OPINION: For a brief moment in time, Surface co-creator Panos Panay made Microsoft almost cool and inspired a wave of innovation — what happened?

[Windows Central]

Satya Nadella's modern Microsoft has given up on innovating and is instead chasing trends without insight.

OPINION: For a brief moment in time, Surface co-creator Panos Panay made Microsoft almost cool and inspired a wave of innovation — what happened? : Read more

 

[GraniteStateColin]

Great article, Jez. Thoughtful, reasonable, and insightful. Loved it. I would very slightly disagree with one of your shots as Satya and team: "It's more likely that it's being suppressed by a C-suite culture that probably should've gone into banking rather than tech." I would say they are good at selling cloud services, which is why their market cap has soared. So I'd replace "banking" with "sales" in that line to give them the bit of credit they deserve here.

I agree about both the real impact from the loss of Panos and the symbolic impact -- MS appears not to care about hardware.

Worst of all from my perspective is the obviously flawed strategy. Microsoft doesn't seem to connect UX/CX and customer loyalty with UI. MS provides great, cost effective, and technically excellent commercial services (OneDrive, SharePoint, Azure are all excellent back-end, cost effective systems). At the same time, with the exception of Teams, they seem to be actively redirecting resources away from ensuring their users have a great experience with their products that run on them, whether on hardware or software. The strategic flaw in this is that there is major sales synergy between users and back-end services.

As Windows Central has covered well, Cortana and likely even Copilot, struggle(d) because there is no mobile platform, which is where users most need AI. Microsoft of today seems to be saying of Microsoft's prior similar mistakes, "Hold my beer..."

 

[GraniteStateColin]

Maybe MS is right about AI with Copilot PC's. Instead of assuming they're onto something, I find myself skeptical. MS has trained me to assume that they'll get bored with whatever they introduce today and drop it in a year or two. You might say, "No way, not after sinking billions into AI." (as I did when they rolled out the last round of Windows phones). They spent billions on mobile and acquiring Nokia. They spent billions on Bethesda to strengthen Xbox, before making the games also available on PS. They actually threw away their dominant position in AR, walking away from a huge contract, proving that they are the ADHD company when it comes to product development.

No wonder Panos had to escape that environment.

Microsoft has trained its customers not to trust them with new products, almost ensuring that all new product launches fail, as we all wait to see if they're still serious about it for at least 2 years. With the majority taking a wait-and-see attitude, everything will appear to fail, forcing MS to drop products that otherwise might have succeeded. This is the real cost of abandoning so many products over the past decade.

And yet, I remain hopeful. I know there are still great people at MS. MS has created many of the greatest products and softwares ever created. I want MS to prove me wrong. I hope someone there reads my posts and makes adjustments to change course to take customer experience on hardware and software seriously again. I hope. I don't expect it, but I hope for it.