There are few things worse than a reformed something-or-other. A person who once weighed in at the top of the scale can’t seem to resist offering dietary advice to others after getting the BMI down to a sane number; the guy who used to drink 15 cups of java a day will prattle on endlessly about how much better his life is now that he’s no longer drinking coffee. Myself – I’m a recovering Microsoft Developer – but I try not to tell all my friends who are stuck on the various versions of Windows how much better my life is now that I use Linux and OSX as my main computing drugs of choice. I try.
However, from time to time you stumble across something that makes you understand why you’ve chosen to walk a certain path in your life. This video, ostensibly released for internal use by Microsoft just drives home that the boys in Redmond have not only lost their A game, but they are *completely* out of touch with reality…. a reality hinted to in the opening lyrics of the music video.
WTF.
I only made it to time point 1m31s. If you, intrepid reader, make it beyond that point in one sitting I suspect that your senses have been dulled by a lobotomy, endless hours of Flavor Of Love, or too much time on the GitMo water board.
Microsoft is charging more and more for features that people need less and less. A fact that was laid out to music by the marketing geniuses that created the youtube travesty above. Add to this an inability to make significant inroads into non-western markets that will soon dwarf the EU/USA market and one could extrapolate a long fade into the sunset for the boys in Redmond. But let us not assume that this giant will go quietly into to the cold cold night. They’re already thrashing about looking for the Oracle way out via the proposed acquisition of Yahoo!. (The full magnitude of this misguided attempt at purchasing market relevancy deserves its own article.)
It would be unfair not to mention many of the things that Microsoft has done well. Myself and many of my friends are proud owners of XBOX 360s; the work done at Microsoft Research is top notch. Even so, now that BluRay has won the field the XBOX 360 will start to feel increased pressure from the PS3. It would also appear that Microsoft’s Research division, while certainly on the cutting edge is not innovating with technologies that are a hop skip and a jump away from market altering products like IBM’s Almaden Research Center or Xerox PARC. In many ways, only time will tell where Microsoft is headed, but if you turn your nose to the wind …we can already smell the fear.
