Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Scoble, firing, and Microsoft as "Brand Cool"

The dog-pile of the week is Mr. Scoble's open letter to BillG and other bemused folks enjoying detailing the Rorschach-like reactions to the post. I totally missed this little part the first time I read through it (colorization / bold mine):

1) Start a weblog. NOW. Get the person who runs the team to start a blog. NOW. Or fire him/her. I'm serious. Make it as cool as the King Kong blog. Put EVERYTHING up on that blog. Videotape every meeting. Every design session. Write something every day.

Fire folks? Boyakasha!

Hey, if it gets people out of the company I'm for this blog-most-coolly-or-walk litmus test whole-hearted! Two thumbs up.

Anyway, going back to a meta-level on Scoble's original post: his point resonates a lot with me with-respect-to:

  1. Microsoft is not cool and
  2. The Microsoft brand, while well known, doesn't mean much to most folks.

We might have touched upon coolness during the internet boom. But we've faded and you just have to believe that this is not missed upon by the analysts. I certainly don't blame our cool-deficit to the lack of black mock turtle-necks around campus... I blame it on the leadership's decision to gravitate towards what they think is easy money: IT.

You can tell me day and night that, new feature-wise, we're licking the boots of the IT department because "that's where the money is" and for some reason people walking around on the street with money in their pocket don't matter because they don't make relevant decisions. B and S. All this IT licking hasn't raised our stock from the dead. The dog and pony shows we put on for analysts are yawn-fests.

To invigorate Microsoft's stock and the view of Microsoft by the analysts, we need an injection of "Oh, I got to get me one of those!" by the everyday consumer. Buzz. I don't know if it's a music player, a phone, another device, or suh-weet software.

We can't just be a technology dial tone.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Being cool is not the same as being successful. Max OS and Linux have been cooler than Windows at least as long as I've been in college. Which is the most successful? The cooler something is, the greater the likelihood that it isn't successful since it tends to be the niche products that end up being christened as cool.

-- Dare

Anonymous said...

>Being cool is not the same as being successful
Thats very true. I think it makes more to think of it in terms of perception - how is Microsoft percieved today in the eyes of the public? How is it different from 5 or 10 years ago? Now do the same with Apple.

See the difference? Apple has always been 'cool'. IMO, today its more than just 'cool'.

The way I see it, we fucked up the marketing angle.

Anonymous said...

What about the Media Center OS? All my technophile friends that watch TV say they love it (I don't watch TV much, so I can't really comment). Would that qualify as consumer coolness?

Who da'Punk said...

The How to Make Microsoft Cool? post adds to the Scoble / Coolness pile.

Yah, the Media Center is cool, especially with the latest release. But it's cool in a clique sort of way that very very few people know about. It's coolness without presence / penetration. Two thumbs up to making money out of variations of the OS, though (Media and Tablet) between releases. Sorry, Acer.

Anonymous said...

Absolutely right. IT departments are in many cases the aggregators of the the technology spend, but they're acting for their end-users and IT mgrs by definition are not interested in rapid change. MSFT used to understand this and in fact made most of its initial inroads into IT by getting end-users excited about its offerings and then having them pressure IT to deploy them. Now, that lesson seems to have been forgotten along with creating end-user excitement, and so we get boring, plodding releases which may please IT departments but rarely end-users and result in stagnant growth and a flat-line stock for MSFT.

IMO, MSFT should split its offerings into two streams - a consumer stream that is fast to market, feature rich (from an end-user's perspective not that of some Redmond code monkey who's never even met a customer) but possibly less backwards compatible. This would give MSFT something to excite end-users, compete against OSS, pressure IT to upgrade and convince a few analysts that maybe the company isn't completely over the hill. The other stream would be the mission critical, fully compatible, exceedingly slow to market offering that is currently provided. The same should be done imo with MSN pitting a fast to market, innovative, thin-client, ASP offering against MSFT's slow to market, thick-client solution. For example, why doesn't MSN buy salesforce.com and pit it against MSFT's CRM and then see who wins? Sure, there'll be come duplication and overlap but since thick-client's future isn't assured (MSFT's desire aside) and the prospects for web-based services are virtually limitless, why not have a foot in both camps - better to be your own competitor than have someone else be.

Anonymous said...

>What about the Media Center OS? All my technophile
>friends that watch TV say they love it

Sounds good, but do they work at Microsoft?

Anonymous said...

>What about the Media Center OS? All my technophile
>friends that watch TV say they love it

Sounds good, but do they work at Microsoft?

Anonymous said...

Hey Mini-Microsoft guy - first off, let me tell you that I dig your blog.

How about doing an entry focusing on the work that Marketing has (not) done for Microsoft?

Anonymous said...

We were losing the "cool" battle in the mid-90s; by the time the boom hit in 1996 and 1997, we'd already lost it. But we were losing in head-on battles with other companies for the kind of really-really-smart employees as early as 1995 - and it was specifically on the idea that we weren't "cool" anymore. The perception that someone could come in and do really interesting things with technology wasn't there anymore, at least, not as it had been.

We still got some great employees after that, of course. But it was a lot harder; we had to go through a lot more interviews with t3h lam3 to get to someone decent, much less someone really good.

-- a former Borg dev.