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Steve Ballmer: We Won't Be Out-Innovated By Apple Anymore
An anonymous reader tips an article about comments from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer regarding Microsoft's attitude toward Apple. It seems Microsoft is tired of being behind the curve in most areas of the tech market, and will be trying very hard to prevent Apple and other companies from beating them to the punch in the future. From the article:
"In a recent interview, Ballmer explained that the company had ceded innovations in hardware and software to Apple, but that the-times-they-are-a-'changin. 'We are trying to make absolutely clear we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple,' Ballmer explained. 'Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch.' ... An admirable goal, but it's fair to argue that attempting to innovate everywhere results in innovation nowhere. A big part of the reason Apple has been so successful is that they devote the bulk of their attention to only a few select market areas. By trying to innovate everywhere, so to speak, Microsoft runs the continued risk of spreading itself too thin and not really having a fundamental impact in any one market."
Sorry, Apple has a patent on innovation.
"we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple"
all that really says is they will be following Apple into any market even ones that aren't right for Microsoft. it actually sounds to me like they are doubling down on copying Apple.
Ballmer to MS board: "Please let stay as the CEO"
Why am I reminded of this Dilbert cartoon from last week?
A decree from the CEO to be more innovative largely means nothing if they can't actually make the change in a meaningful way and bring out products.
If Microsoft has been innovating and not creating products, they're idiots. If they haven't been innovating, well, that's the fundamental problem, isn't it?
Microsoft has been so mired in the "copy someone else's product badly" mentality for so long, I question if Balmer understand what needs to be done to fix this. Certainly not just a speech.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ballmer seems to be citing the ongoing (prior?) battles as areas where MS intends to fight... That's great and all, assuming MS delivers, but they should instead be focussing on the next battles.
they're going to do something that is completely against/opposite any and all products or direction they have ever made or gone? I'll believe it when I see it!
They don't have the best track record on original products :)
Work smarter, not harder: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-07-06/ .
Because innovation is the same way - Ballmer doesn't want to be out-innovated in any of the established "hot" areas but he doesn't know what he doesn't know.
Why? Because Jobs is dead?
"Innovation." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You want to out-innovate Apple? Don't make a goal of going head-to-head with them everywhere - that's copying, the exact opposite of innovating. Compete where you actually have a newer, better product than they have. Compete where they have no product. Let them win where you cannot create a better or more innovative product. I'm sure Sun Tzu had something I could quote here, but I can't remember anything offhand.
So if a team of 20 build a new widget, which rockets into fame (yes this is a work of fiction), then the 2 people will get all the credit, 16 will get credit for being there, and the other 2 will be blow standards. I don't think we have to worry about Microsoft changing.
"then they laugh at you"
"then they fight you"
"and then you win."
It looks like Ballmer has decided to proceed from stage 2 to stage 3. This is really the first time I recall him doing anything to admit there's a problem. Usually the MS stage puppets just keep up the brainwashing with how MS is doing so well and owns the market and is the leader in everything and how the new blablabla is going to be such a smashing success. You know the gloves have come off when Ballmer admits they're behind.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Thankfully, all it takes is a declaration from the CEO to turn everything around. (At this point, sarcasm should actually condense out of the air around you.)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
"Well, we are the most focused company that I know of, or have read of, or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number, so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose, so that we can deliver the best products in the world. In fact, the table that each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, and yet Apple’s revenue last year was over $40 billion. I think the only other company that could say that is an oil company."
Microsoft is too large and unfocused to sustain innovation. They will continue to be fast followers, and still make plenty of money doing it.
We're at a stage in the computer industry where innovation is the LAST thing we need.
What we need is bug fixes and "refinement". Microsoft didn't need to force Metro on us...they just needed to perfect Windows 7. Apple isn't redesigning OS X every 2 years. They're tweaking it an making it better.
The endless push for NEW products is what screws up the computer industry. Nothing is ever actually *finished*.
Don't forget Microsoft got where is today via. winning the small business market and then sneaking into to enterprise desktop to overturn the Mainframes and Minis. Microsoft understands fully well if they are knocked out mostly from consumer by 2020, by 2030 things could look very different in enterprise.
If Ballmer thinks that his problem is being 'out-innovated' by Apple, his attempt to respond is going to be about as effectual as a fish out of water.
Apple doesn't really do innovation as much as they do polished, decisive, takes on things that were previously relegated to niche status or mediocrity. They've also shown a historical willingness to murder even their popular products in order to introduce something that they like better(ipod mini being the most notable recent example: killed at the height of its popularity in favor of more expensive and lower-capacity flash-based products, because rotating media were deemed sufficiently inelegant.
If 'innovation' were the problem, Microsoft could trivially bury Apple in wacky stuff coming out of MS research. As it is, though, they can't even refrain from eating any of their own young that don't play nicely enough with Windows/Office, and they have a veritable talent for squandering even the technical superiority areas that they do have by making them too expensive or too complex for individual users(eg. MS had volume shadow copy in full working order since server 2003, and has substantial clout in terms of getting OEMs to build things, plus an embedded OS to license to them for the purpose. So why is it that they let Apple beat them to releasing a usable-by-morons home backup system(based on a rather more primitive and hacky architecture) 4 years later?)
It is. It's an easy thing to say. And very soothing to stockholders I'm sure. But how are you going to do it? It's sort of like saying "I'm going to have an innovative idea by 3pm tomorrow!" Ok, that's great. How exactly do you do that?
Innovation isn't something you simply decide you're going to have, and then you have it.
What you can do is to change your culture, foster ideas, hire people and don't abuse them. Make your environment a place where innovation can happen. I'm looking at you forced curve. People who think "outside the box" do not like being put in one. If you set up your environment to where only drones do well, then drones are what you'll have. Any real rogue thinkers in the Microsoft structure would get crushed like ants. Need I remind you Einstein did some of his best work while he was getting poor reviews as a patent clerk?
And innovation isn't something you can really buy, either. Although MS tries. The current MS policy of borg-like assimilation of any outside company that might have a good idea isn't really working, is it? It's a wonderful tribute to the amount of money you have, but it hasn't produced any sort of good results I can think of in a decade. Hell, you guys couldn't even keep Hotmail working. They were the #1 gold standard, and Google waltzed right into that space with Gmail and it's a done deal now.
In short, if you want to lead you better change. Your culture is all wrong for innovation.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
When their key UI insight is to remove the Start button from their next OS release, you know they have problems......
Microsoft is always talking about what they're gonna do. They need to just shut up and actually DO something. Their last innovative product was when they created the GUI version of the spreadsheet and called it 'Excel.' Since then, the innovation has been a little slow. The problem starts with Ballmer. He is not thinking about cool stuff that can be done with tech. No, he's thinking about how he can make money doing cool stuff that others are doing. As they say in Texas, Microsoft is all hat and no cattle.
Can I compare this to Khan's tunnel vision on the incapacitated Reliant as he's still going after the Enterprise at the end of Wrath?
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
Innovation does not mean buying out new startups with promising technology.
It means investing in people, technology, and software, building towards a hoped-for future.
Neither Apple nor MicroSoft have done much innovating in the past 25 years. All they've done is fine tune, repackage, and buy startups that were promising or a threat.
Until the bottom line is the corporate future instead of the shareholder payout, it won't change, either.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When you go back a while, when die Microsoft ever really "Invent" something?
DOS bought from Seattle Computer Products, idea for Windows in general nicked from Xerox, Browser taken over from NCSA Mosaic, PSTools acquired from Sysinternals, etc....
The only difference now seems to be that Apple isn't willing to be bought up and/or hoodwinked into giving up their innovation to MS.
Perhaps he also should have mentioned that he intends for Microsoft to sell more, higher value products and to earn more money!
How do they think of these things? They just must be thinking all the time over there at Microsoft!
Frankly, I don't even want Microsoft to be "innovative." At this point, they're pretty much like a public utility – I prefer when they're doing their work in the background, and I mostly only notice if they screw something up.
The fundamental problem is that Microsoft should be transitioning from a high-growth company to a stable, mature company – from a financial perspective, less emphasis on stock appreciation and more on dividends. People – and more importantly, businesses – rely on Microsoft for un-sexy features like backwards compatibility, familiarity, installed base, and stability (some of the older Slashdotters may laugh, but Windows 7 really is a rock-stable OS, and even a fully patched XP isn't bad.) The fact is that Windows became "good enough" for most users years ago, and everything since then has been either incremental improvements or actual degradation. There hasn't been any major positive "paradigm shift" on the desktop and there won't be. Some users will find that they don't need a full-fledged PC and will transition to tablets, but many, perhaps a majority, still need the power and/or flexibility that only a complete desktop OS can offer. This is Microsoft's niche. They need to focus on it and stop chasing phantoms.
I completely agree. The way they have things set up, it's a race to be that top 1 in 10 not to go out on a limb and risk being label as the loser. Stick with what you know, make sure you only color inside the lines, refine something that worked in the past (or for someone else). But come up with wildly new ideas and get them out the door? Nobody is signing up for that.
I know why they have this system in place, but it's so completely misguided them up to now that I don't know if they could recover from it (from a "OK, from now on we innovate!" perspective) even if they ditched it tomorrow.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
did Ballmer jump around like a monkey when he said that???
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It seems Microsoft is working hard on innovating themselves out of the market... they seem to have confused "different" with "innovative".. Windows 8 will be... different
"Not going to happen. Not on our watch."
LOL. This piece of history (Ballmer's "watch") has already been written.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Make your product the coolest there is and make no compromise to compatibility with previous products.
Then support that product for it's entire lifecycle, including real updates. If you drop support for phones sold less than a year ago that run your current latest telephone OS, you will never get anyone to believe your product is worth spending 150% of the competitors price on. You can't have your cake and eat it too, if you drop support for older hardware, make sure the older hardware has served it's purpose and is probably worn out as it is.
Make sure your product only comes in one or two flavors. How many versions of windows are there again? There's 4 versions or so of 2008R2 server, 7 or so of windows 7? Just make "server" and "desktop" and give them the same name and API. Put some server centric apps on the server and desktop centric apps on the desktop, but the OS API should be uniform amongs the two versions.
Make sure there is a "support" that just gives support for that machine. Again, 2 options, desktop support and server support. Nothing more, nothing less.
People like the simple proposals that don't give them more chances to pick the wrong option. How frustrated do you think your customers are when they get told that their "genuine" windows version doesn't have that feature that their neighbors or work PC has and not only that, since they bought OEM they should get support from their vendor and not MicroSoft? Really....Stop coming back for a glass of milk when you already got the cookie. if you want more, charge a whole cake in advance and then just give people what they want for the cake in return without telling them no after they already paid.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Look at RIM. Turns out if someone makes a consumer product that competes with your business product, your business product doesn't matter so much.
Do you see what I did there?
MS brought us the optical mouse, the original tablet PC, smartphones that were document-compatible with the desktop, MS Bob, and thousands of other innovations; some of which caught on, some of which vanished into the mists of time.
The problem is not that MS doesn't innovate with technologies, it's that they don't innovate in sales, marketing or production. They seem unwilling to be the pig in any enterprise, and would rather be the chicken.
Remember, when a CEO talks innovation, they're usually not talking technical innovation. Where does Apple innovate? In design and marketing.
This is actually a problem, because all those things you mentioned, from SCP, Xerox, NCSA and Winternals/Sysinternals are cases where MS took a risk on producing and marketing someone else's innovation. With stuff coming out of their own labs, that rarely happens (the MS optical mouse being one of the few exceptions) because there's no push (someone can say "see that great product X over there? We could buy that and make money off of it!" but the MS culture wouldn't get people behind "Lab Y has come up with this really neat tech -- if we give it to this design team, they might be able to produce a wonderful product we can make money off of!").
Your use of "decisive" is probably the best word I've heard to describe Apple. What set them apart as far back as the gumdrop iMac wasn't their ability to say "no" to things or to innovate so much as their ability to say YES to things without qualification.
That's Apple's unique strength. While everyone else is hedging their bets and keeping pokers in the fire, Apple bets the farm over and over again. They never doubt. They never second-guess themselves. A decision is made and that's that. They put every . last . resource . into the things that they run with, and as a result, those things carry the weight (the embodied human knowledge, labor, energy, research, refinement, etc.) of the entire organization within them.
So often in the tech industry you get the feeling that every other company is watching the stats about every product in their lineup, just waiting to kill them at the first hint of weakness and loathe to invest in them further once they're out the door. They keep thirty or fifty or a hundred product lines just barely alive but perpetually on the chopping block, none of them ever named "do or die" for the company, which makes consumers hesitate to use them in "do or die" situations in real life.
The only other product line that ever seemed even close to as "committed" as the iDevices was IBM's ThinkPad series back in the day, but even then it wasn't at the same level.
Every time Apple launches a new family of anything (OS, computing device, consumer device, service) there is a vast geography of scoffing from all of the other industry players, and a lot of critics saying they've got it wrong.
But Apple doesn't care whether they've got it "right" or "wrong," they care that they execute and perfect whatever it happens to be that they've got. In the end, that focus on execution and perfection tends to make it "right" within a product cycle or two.
because Steve Jobs is dead
love is just extroverted narcissism
Apple doesn't have to lose for Microsoft to win.
Apple has always shown the willingness to cannibalize its own product line. Microsoft has not.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The problem with Microsoft (and other companies) that Apple didn't have is that they are slaves to market research. Apple did what they thought the consumer wanted, instead of researching the consumer and then making the same crap that they were already buying.
This is the thinking that lead to the cancellation of the Courier (google it, it was awesome).
By chasing trends, you will never be leading. I think this quote is quite apt:
"There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them."
- Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin
"There are NO Apple Infidels in Microsoft's marketspace! We are re-soundly defeating them! They are nothing when face with our superior products! The are worth no more than an old shoe! Those are not Apple products, those are Microsoft products! I tell you, they lie!! We have them surrounded in their Ipads!!"
It's last thing at night, my wife is immersed in some fictive on her Slate, and i've been watching TV, a rebuild of American Pie on mine. For a few years it was lame - it really didn't age well - but the rebuild is funny, because an AI has been spicing it up, and it's got Marilyn Monroe in it now, and she's still hot. And the soundtrack with New Beatles is kinda good too; John Lennon II - the AI clone - is really getting it right, and the music is going places it didn't when the Beatles were alive.
Boris, our AI housekeeper, has realised that I have to be up by 6am tomorrow, and I take it as a subtle hint that we should be turning in when he starts dimming the walls. "Hey, Boris", I mutter, "hang on for ten minutes." The walls brighten a little, he's bumped up the lightness of the wallpaper pattern. I say he, but I guess he's not really he. "Also, I've just remembered, I'm going to need the Mercury file on the plane tomorrow." No need to worry about that now; Boris will talk to my desk and get that moved to the slate I'm going to take with me tomorrow. I watch the last few minutes of the movie, and then get ready for bed. Liz is still engrossed in some historical fictive. Her and a bunch of friends have been writing a community set in the 18th century. It's not my cup of tea, but it's been getting great reviews from all the people following them. It's better soap than soap to be honest, and some of them are getting really famous now. A real bonus is that it's desperately hard to sneak product placement into historical drama. Lol. But they were offered trips to Vegas if they'd name a character in reference to the new Audi Scoot. I decide that it would be nice to have a glass of juice before bed, so I help myself to one, and then climb into bed next to Liz. At least I don't have to brush my teeth anymore. Not since I had that DentaZ treatment; all my enamel has been renewed, I've been vaccinated against caries, and my oral bacteria have been repopulated with a healthier batch. I give Liz a kiss and drift off to sleep to the sound of Liz subvocalising the plot for the next day for her character, Charlotte.
I wake hugely refreshed. Boris has organised the room lighting so that it's timed to my sleep cycle. The interesting bits of the news are cycling up the wall, and there's a note that I wrote to myself to take a phone. That's not something I normally carry, but I'm going to need some privacy. After showering, it's straight into the car. It will arrange to pick up breakfast on the way. I work while it's driving. It's pretty quick once we join the cartrain. I forgot my work Slate at home. I guess I was still dozy, but I get the car to pull the Mercury file up onto the windscreen, and the dash screen. I start by reading the summary that the office AI has provided. It's also given a tree of the most important bits, so I have a look through the tree. About half way through I realise that I don't understand how the deal is structured, so I call the office AI, and ask. She explains that she has spoken to Mercury's AIs, and they've come up with 3 scenario deals, and that this one is the primary. I ask her about how we'll be handling things going forward if we can agree the deal, and she flashes some graphs to my car screen. We agree to chat later in the day.
By the time I get to the airport, it's only 15 minutes before my flight. I've been precleared for everything. It's a bit weird actually getting on a plane. It's been at least two years since I had any face-to-face meetings but this one is too important to leave to tele. I walk straight to the gate. I've been scanned thoroughly ever since we reached the road to the airport. I've been profiled, the car vouched for me, Boris has, my movements over the last 4 years have been analysed. The airport know I am me.
After I've boarded the plane I get my phone out, and flick it at my seat screen, so it knows that I want to use that. It's not as smart as a Slate, but it can talk to the seat adequately, and it was keeping an eye on what was going on with the car
Famous last words. Apple and Microsoft are two completely different and conflicting cultures of corporatism. There is something more profound happening here.