The Ever Increasingly Irrelevant Microsoft

It's really neat to watch a behemoth stumbling after being beset by a flurry of tiny little bee-stings. The very same Microsoft that was thought to be immune to pesty competition and would ferociously attack and crush all feeble attempts is dying from within itself. In previous postings, I'd written that I thought that Microsoft had simply become to large for its own good... the truth is that apart from being too big, they're mismanaged.

Robert Scoble, loyal Microsoft defensive shield and "unofficial" mouthpiece of the company, is a hilarious read. With each passing week, he becomes more and more defensive as people keeping pestering him with inconvenient questions... such as "where in the world is Longhorn (now Vista)?!?" His responses to Apple comparisons are hilarious. Um, so, a smartwatch is a good comeback to an ever delayed OS release that Bill Gates himself said that the future of the company would rely upon?

So, this week, they announced that the next release of Windows was to be "Vista" (as in what you see outside a window. Perhaps they're trying to sell a car or even a dishwasher. Do they think that the average person is going to understand that Vista is an upgrade to the OS? What will the update to Vista be called? Vista Mejor to be followed by Vista más Mejor?

The problem is that they got to this point all on their own. The hegemony they sought was realized and instead of seizing the leadership opportunity, they foisted more irrelevant upgrades down our throat until Mozilla, Linux and finally Apple woke up and started delivering stuff we wanted... things that we'd never heard or conceived of like reliability, less crashes, less virus attacks and spyware and get this... easy to use music software and hardware.

As I told Scoble, it's too bad that the people have tired of the "I can do that too" game that seems to be the only game Microsoft can play... want the latest example, try VirtualEarth... does it look familiar?