This was an outstanding year for Microsoft with some big customer wins. But these seven missteps were just dumb.
Hey, Nobody’s Perfect
If you are looking in Microsoft’s rear mirror, that you can describe what you spot in hundreds of the way. One adjective you almost certainly won’t use for the company’s 2013 is “quiet.”
It was a hectic year even by Microsoft’s standards. From Windows 8.1 to Xbox One to the Nokia device business acquisition to Office 365’s continued growth to Steve Ballmer’s (somewhat) surprising retirement announcement — let alone that whole NSA spying thing — it seemed each week brought a brand new wave of headlines out of Redmond.
There was excellent news. Office 365 had some big customer wins and gave the impression to solidify the way forward for the Office franchise. Xbox One seems to be a success. The Azure cloud is expanding globally. The skin 2 and Surface 2 Pro are sold out, or even if there’s some inventory management magic behind the demand, it still makes a very good headline for the Monday morning PR roundup. So 2013 wasn’t a lousy year for Microsoft.
But, hey, let’s accept it. It’s more fun to select apart a company’s shakier decisions and flat-out mistakes. So that is what we’re here to do.
“Frustration” could be a more apt term than “mistake” on occasion here — as in frustration with Microsoft’s apparent belief that a Microsoft customer can’t even be a Google or Apple customer. Google doesn’t mind acknowledging that the contest exists. “Inside the next couple of weeks, you could download a brand new version of the Google Search app on iPhone and iPad,” the corporate wrote in a up to date blog post touting the company’s Hummingbird update. “So in case you tell your Nexus 7, ‘OK, Google. Strike a cord in me to shop for olive oil at Safeway,’ in case you walk into the shop together with your iPhone, you’re going to get a reminder.” See that? Dogs and cats, living together. (No human sacrifice or mass hysteria, either.)
A related frustration is the 2013 marketing push that insists the arena craves “one experience” for everything we do, as though we were living in a dystopian novel. And while we’re relating to frustrations, Microsoft must stop communicating with consumers and businesses as though they were investors and board members. “Devices and services” might perfectly describe Microsoft’s vision of its future self, but if was the last time anyone said, “i believe i will go buy some devices and services today”? Apple, by comparison, doesn’t sell devices and services. It sells iPhones and music (and other stuff).
Sometimes frustrations morph into tangible mistakes — pretending, as an instance, that Office devotees don’t use iPads, a head-in-sand strategy if there ever was one. As our own Michael Endler reported in April:
Forrester analyst Dave Johnson told InformationWeek in February that Microsoft could reap greater returns if it stops protecting Windows and starts treating Office as a multi-OS platform. In an interview conducted previous to the Outlook RT rumors hit, Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi offered similar sentiments, saying that because Office for iOS represents one of these massive opportunity, this is ‘only an issue of time’ until Redmond finally makes its move.
The time for that move was 2013. Alas, it didn’t happen, so it’s on our list.
Not on our list: There is a good deal of wait-and-see stuff happening within the Microsoft universe presently, from the continued lookup Ballmer’s successor to the Nokia acquisition to the following evolutions of Windows 8.x. It’s too early to pass sound judgment with a lot to be determined on those fronts — the CEO seat perhaps most of all. We’ll must revisit those on the end of 2014.
In the meantime, click the picture above to dive right into a slideshow on last year’s mistakes. Got your individual bones to pick out with Microsoft’s moves in 2013? Let’s hear them within the comments.
Kevin Casey is a writer based in North Carolina who covers technology affecting small and midsized businesses.
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