Microsoft Brand In Sharp Decline 399
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."
popularity and peer pressure (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:You don't say... (Score:2, Interesting)
Brand Dilution (Score:5, Interesting)
When you come to the fork in the road, take it (Score:5, Interesting)
(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?
Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When you come to the fork in the road, take it (Score:0, Interesting)
So no, we're not approaching that point.
Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:3, Interesting)
MSN (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No suprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Redmond weather alert (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Really (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read the article, you will see that sales/profits etc.. have very little effect on the phenomena observed, unless you argue that sales correlate directly with investment potential, in which case you might be right. To counter though, MS stock has been virtually static for quite some time.:
CoreBrand measures brand power using four criteria. It first rates the familiarity of a company's brand. Once a company has a certain level of familiarity, they are ranked according to three "attributes of favorability": overall reputation, perception of management and investment potential, Gregory said. While Microsoft's brand is still eminently recognizable, the company is declining in all three favorable attributes, he said.
Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting.. (Score:3, Interesting)
If software was so integral to apple, then why don't they sell licenses for generic PC's? Because it's all about the hardware.
Re:When you come to the fork in the road, take it (Score:3, Interesting)
I get or recommend it for family so I don't have to sit there and fix anything when I visit. Or take calls after work.
Sure, I could install Ubuntu (and do for people with PCs) but that leaves me with the headache of installing printers sometimes. And forget All-In-Ones. With a Mac, there are ready made solutions which most people want.
I can't the number of times I had to reinstall Windows XP on this damned machine over the years. On my 3 year old Mac? Never. And I never felt that was cruft on there slowing it down..... (and I was never afraid to install the random app...) That's pretty much how I know why people like Macs.
worthless (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Redmond weather alert (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be interesting to know if studies such as these actually do factor into the accounting of intangibles and goodwill. Any CPA's out there?
Re:Redmond weather alert (Score:2, Interesting)
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.)
Re:No way! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What Microsoft has forgotten.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoft Flight simulator, Microsoft Keyboard, mouse, sidewinder joystick, Microsoft Streets & trips, Windows XP.
All microsoft products i have purchased because i percieved them has having more features, being easier to use, and being more stable than competing products.
MSFS -- the only real competition is X-plane... it has a nice flight engine, but the interface sucks, features are lacking, & runs like shit on windows (its programmed on & for macOS)
MS kb & mouse -- The 5-button ms explorer optical is by far my favorite mouse. The MS keyboard would be nice if the media buttons were mappable, but it has better range than any other wireless ive used.
Sidewinder force feedback -- there is no other joystick that has the quality & features of this joystick, logitech comes close, but not close enough
Streets & trips -- Ive not found any other gps-capable trip planners with the features of S&S for less than $100.
windows XP -- lotsa people apparently have problems with windows, i guess im just lucky because ive not had any. everybody claims macOS is easier to use, but everytime ive been unfortunate enough to use it, ive spent most of the time digging for options that apple decided werent popular enough to put on top... its TOO easy to use... feels like im trying to tie my shoes with mittens on. Linux is fun to toy around with, but when i need to get stuff done i still reboot back to XP. None of my favorite software runs on linux unless i run windows underneath it, & at that point, why not just run XP? And as for stability, im still running the same install of XP pro ive had since it came out, no reinstalls in... what 6 or 7 years now?
I have (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:What Microsoft has forgotten.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't believe me? Look at it this way. Of course Apple computers are *good*, but "quality product" also implies a decent price. If I offered you an ounce of gold for 2000 bucks (the current price is around 1000), would you buy it? No. But why not - isn't gold a quality product? The answer is that yes, it is, but that's simply irrelevant if the price isn't right.
As for McDonald's, they do make a product that's good *and* that has the right price. Maybe you wouldn't agree with the former assertion (or the latter, for that matter, although that one of course hinges on the former), but enough people do to make them successful.
Re:What Microsoft has forgotten.... (Score:3, Interesting)
From an engineer's perspective this is absolutely true. From a typical consumer's perspective, it's anything but.
From a consumer perspective, a media player, cd burning, etc. is to the OS as climate control and leather seats and such are to a car. None of these features are part of the core functionality of the product, but some of them are seen as essential by consumers, and some of them are major differentiators between similar products in the market.
Re:Another Columnist Discovers The Real World (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:You don't say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hah. While you jest, I've seen quite a number of non-techies seriously annoyed with Windows — so annoyed, in fact, that one of my colleagues asked me a number of questions about my MacBook Pro just yesterday. It seems her next laptop will have nothing to do with Microsoft.
Linux has a bit lower penetration among non-technical users... then again, my father, stepmother, grandfather and grandmother are all running Kubuntu. Primarily thanks to me, though — my grandparents have absolutely no need for Windows, since they are complete newbies (I built their computer a few weeks ago).
Apple, however... it looks pretty, it's stable — I certainly cannot attest to any of the problems my Windows-based friends encounter — and it's not Microsoft.
Forget the geek cred; Microsoft's has been pretty much ruined for years. Now the non-geeks are catching on.
Microsoft will bounce back, windows might not (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft almost seem to have given up on their PC products. They are churning out latest versions of Office and Windows in order to keep milking their core consumers, but their heart doesn't seem to be in it anymore. Its more like rent-seeking than software development for them now. They seem to have bought their own carefully crafted image of immortality and become complacent.
They just haven't cottoned on to the essential change in peoples perceptions of computers since the last time they fucked up good and proper (Windows ME). You used to talk to non-technical people and they would complain about how computers are too slow and computers are always getting viruses and crashing and computers always need reformatting. Now that the majority of the population have been shown there are computers that don't suffer nearly so badly from those issues, they are more and more talking about how windows always gets viruses, crashes and needs reinstalling. The crappiness of windows is no longer assumed to be just a general feature of computers that users have to live with.
The Xbox line seems still pretty strong though, with a certain demographic of gamers (I won't be too insulting seeing as I imagine a lot of the people here own an Xbox or Xbox 360, but my image of the average Halo player does involve a sideways baseball cap). In fact I think it is strong enough to keep Microsoft afloat and in the public mind no matter what happens to windows/office. Whether or not they can make an apple-like comeback and re-enter the OS market if Windows 7 doesn't miraculously save them, remains to be seen.
Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:2, Interesting)
MS marketing gone wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:3, Interesting)
Come to think of it the cycles themselves are nothing but fashion accessories. The japanese bikes are better in every objective criteria.