Submission + - Hey, Microsoft! What do you actually do?
Anonymous Coward writes: "An open letter to Microsoft:
Let's talk core competency.
In plain English, what does your business do? Yes, I know you do a lot of things, but you can only have one core.
What is the base purpose of the gathering of human energy that goes under the label 'Microsoft'?
To write software for microprocessors.
Too many people in upper management at MS have confused potential customers with competitors.
Why, in 2007, should a software maker consider ANY hardware maker an enemy?
You NEED hardware makers. It's not 1992 anymore. Fewer and fewer hardware makers are buying operating systems as they make more and more devices that need them.
Few people know what operating system their phone uses, fewer what their set-top DVD player uses, even fewer know that these things even HAVE operating systems.
(Oh, and thanks for bending the definition of "operating system" to mean not only the system, but the interface and bundled applications as well. Most people think the UI *is* the system and the system is "the kernel". Non-tech people call the monitor "the computer" and the tower "the hard drive"; why did you have to mess up the semi-tech people, too?)
Research In Motion owns e-mail junkies. Apple is shooting for couch potatoes, teenie boppers, and web browsers. Sony and Nintendo are going for high end and low end gamers respectively. Nokia bets on people gabbing to one another. None of them buy software from you.
In plain English, what does your business do? What is the purpose of the gathering of human energy that goes under the label 'Microsoft'? To write software.
For whom? Only for platforms that you wrote the OS for? For a software company, that's limiting your market.
As I see it Microsoft, as a group, has three choices:
a) Get back to it's core competency.
Write software. Write apps for every platform. Get a pro-MS podcast on iTunes, write the best selling Playstaton 3 game, make MS software the #1 software for Symbian phones. Leverage the popularity of any platform instead of fighting it. Write software.
b) Protect it's desktop monopoly.
The PC has always and will always own The Enterprise. However, it's no guarantee that Windows will always rule the enterprise. If they don't use that newly acquired unix license to copy Apple yet again, Linux will continue it's 1000 cuts.
Stop being stubborn. Admit Apple was right and go unix. Virtualized Vista can be bundled as your "Classic". Use the XBox360 API as your game engine (Renamed Direct X 11) and you will own the PC Gaming for another decade, at least.
Stick to geeks at work and geeks at play and pray Michael Dell never gets smart enough or brave enough to write his own OS.
c) Become a hardware company.
You have enough cash reserves to get to Version 3 of XBox and of Zune. If you bit the bullet and went end-to-end systems, you could make a killer PC and would be years ahead of Dell, HP, Gateway and everyone else too lazy to write their own OS."
Let's talk core competency.
In plain English, what does your business do? Yes, I know you do a lot of things, but you can only have one core.
What is the base purpose of the gathering of human energy that goes under the label 'Microsoft'?
To write software for microprocessors.
Too many people in upper management at MS have confused potential customers with competitors.
Why, in 2007, should a software maker consider ANY hardware maker an enemy?
You NEED hardware makers. It's not 1992 anymore. Fewer and fewer hardware makers are buying operating systems as they make more and more devices that need them.
Few people know what operating system their phone uses, fewer what their set-top DVD player uses, even fewer know that these things even HAVE operating systems.
(Oh, and thanks for bending the definition of "operating system" to mean not only the system, but the interface and bundled applications as well. Most people think the UI *is* the system and the system is "the kernel". Non-tech people call the monitor "the computer" and the tower "the hard drive"; why did you have to mess up the semi-tech people, too?)
Research In Motion owns e-mail junkies. Apple is shooting for couch potatoes, teenie boppers, and web browsers. Sony and Nintendo are going for high end and low end gamers respectively. Nokia bets on people gabbing to one another. None of them buy software from you.
In plain English, what does your business do? What is the purpose of the gathering of human energy that goes under the label 'Microsoft'? To write software.
For whom? Only for platforms that you wrote the OS for? For a software company, that's limiting your market.
As I see it Microsoft, as a group, has three choices:
a) Get back to it's core competency.
Write software. Write apps for every platform. Get a pro-MS podcast on iTunes, write the best selling Playstaton 3 game, make MS software the #1 software for Symbian phones. Leverage the popularity of any platform instead of fighting it. Write software.
b) Protect it's desktop monopoly.
The PC has always and will always own The Enterprise. However, it's no guarantee that Windows will always rule the enterprise. If they don't use that newly acquired unix license to copy Apple yet again, Linux will continue it's 1000 cuts.
Stop being stubborn. Admit Apple was right and go unix. Virtualized Vista can be bundled as your "Classic". Use the XBox360 API as your game engine (Renamed Direct X 11) and you will own the PC Gaming for another decade, at least.
Stick to geeks at work and geeks at play and pray Michael Dell never gets smart enough or brave enough to write his own OS.
c) Become a hardware company.
You have enough cash reserves to get to Version 3 of XBox and of Zune. If you bit the bullet and went end-to-end systems, you could make a killer PC and would be years ahead of Dell, HP, Gateway and everyone else too lazy to write their own OS."