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.

 

[pjmlp]

The way they have made Windows developer community not care about WinRT, given the whole Windows Phone hardware story, the multiple rewrites that made WinRT irrelevant for anyone outside Windows team itself, the ongoing push to stuff Web widgets on all their key applications, like Office and Teams, or how Windows 10 and 11 are nowadays full with ads for cloud stuff, most people would leave for something if there was a real alternative.

In many countries Apple devices are too expensive, and Chromebooks as well for what they offer.

However if a couple of OEMs decide to have their second coming of Netbooks, or if Google makes Android on Tablets a good enough laptop like experience, things will only get worse.

Panos is certainly not designing hardware to run Windows at Amazon.

It is backwards compatibility and games that keep Windows going for many households, and Microsoft doesn't seem to even get this going nowadays with their cloud focus.

 

[Kaymd]

Surface has definitely stagnated. While the Duo and Duo2 may not have been commercial hits, they strongly represent the spirit of adventure and innovation that Surface was known for.

This is an unfortunate side effect of profit being the measure of all endeavors.

If any venture is not dramatically profitable, particularly in the large corporations, it's effectively deemed a failure. I believe this has been the challenge Surface has had in Microsoft, especially with Panos and team being innovative and experimental.

While Surface Pro, Laptop and maybe Book and Studio lines have been quite successful, there have been other efforts like the Duo, Headphones, Earbuds, Speakers etc. that did not really take-off. This refusal to accept the bad with the good at Microsoft is a fundamental weakness of the large corporations.

Experimentation and pushing the envelope inherently contains risks. You can never be certain if any product will be successful in the marketplace. Doesn't matter what feasibility studies, market research etc. says. No one ever knows for sure if a product will be successful. Nadella's Microsoft unfortunately lacks this ability to accommodate ambitious experiments.

Here we are now, making boatloads of money but everything is bland and mediocre.

 

[TheFerrango]

As is always the case, prioritising share value over actual products is a short-term solution, eventually you run out of stem to pump those share values up. Greater dividends should be the side effect, not the goal, of a thriving company

 

[naddy69]

I have said this 100 times. Here is 101.

Microsoft is NOT a consumer products company. Stop expecting MS to fill your consumer product needs. MS is totally business/enterprise focused.

Nothing wrong with that. You might as well wonder why Apple has no business products. Both companies are very successful in their respective markets. Both are focusing on their strengths.

Consumers don't care about "Copilot PCs" because consumers don't care about Windows PCs in general. Consumers use Windows PCs at work for 8 hours a day, if they use them at all. Copilot PCs was as dumb an idea as was dual screen phones.

Microsoft does not NEED to be perceived as "cool". "Cool" does not get you hundreds of millions of Windows/Office desktop licenses in Fortune 500 companies. "Cool" does not get you major Azure contracts.

Share value is all that matters. Microsoft is today worth more than at any time in its history. There is a reason for that. Losing billions of dollars a year on "great products" that no one wants to buy is not a recipe for a successful company.