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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.
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.
Why? Because Jobs is dead?
"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.
MS board to Ballmer: "No we not."
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*.
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.
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!
Ballmer in a month: "They fled. The Apple louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of Microsoft yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the Apple employees. We had not anticipated this... Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Redmond. Be assured, Redmond is safe, protected."
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.