“What’s remarkable—and what should be, for any Microsoft shareholders, a deeply troubling sign—is that Ballmer, apparently, wants to do none of this. For him, the PC model is the only option. It doesn’t matter that it has never worked for this market in the past. It doesn’t matter that the tablet needs a new approach to user interface design, one that is fundamentally different from that of traditional PCs. Ballmer wants the PC business model—a Microsoft operating system on commodity hardware—running PC software, and the unsuitability of that software is seen as an irrelevance.”

Apparently though, they have a new tablet to show at CES this year. Given how well their announced-at-last-year’s-CES tablets did this year, it’ll be awesome … oh wait, they never shipped. Never mind.

Anyone else noticing a pattern with Microsoft announcements?

“Microsoft has never been cool, has never had good taste, but their lack of cool and lack of taste are spiraling out of control.”

… in reference to a Staged Funeral for iPhone and BlackBerry.

“In Word 2008, you have at least three different ways of viewing the same information (the style[s] of the current selection), i.e. a palette, a toolbar control, and a dialog box, and none of them is able to provide any useful information. In addition, each of them provides a difference piece of false information!”

Lots of screen shots. Good write up. Check it out.

What do you think? Is this a nicely polished gimmick, or the future of computing?

“a website where you can share, vote for, and discuss ideas that will help make Best Buy a better company. The site is built using Ruby on Rails and runs in Amazon’s Compute Cloud.”

Maybe open source and cloud computing isn’t so bad, ‘eh? Beautiful looking site too.

“Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t come bundled with PHP, Rails, or any other open-source web development frameworks or languages any time soon. More and more of what we do is in the cloud these days anyways and it is almost starting to feel quaint when you come across new software that runs solely as a desktop client. Microsoft has painted themselves into a corner – they rely on closed formats and standards in a world where open source software, open formats, and open standards are king.”

I have to agree. I know very few web developers that have Windows and like it. Most “Web 2.0″ developers I know already have Mac’s, or are planning to switch soon, which makes me wonder what that will happen long term … if all future software is on the web (which seems to be the case more and more each year), and all of that is developed on non-Microsoft tools, will Microsoft cease to be relevant?

“This is impenetrable. It’s UI salad. I realize this is not (yet) shipping software, but my god. If you sat me down in front of this, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to begin.”

[via Daring Fireball, via Lifehacker]

[Windows 7 is] essentially the same kernel and the same OS, with a couple new technologies thrown in, such as the Surface-based multitouch capabilities and the ability for developers to ribbon-bar-enable their own apps for better consistency with Microsoft’s new UI approach (one that people either seem to love or hate). “It’s not anything radical,” says Neil MacDonald, a Gartner analyst who follows Microsoft. “It’s a polished version of Vista.”

If Windows 7 is more of the same, then maybe it’s time to conclude that Windows is a technology dead end. Last spring, Gartner warned that Microsoft had to radically change Windows or watch it fade into irrelevancy. Windows 7 is not that radical change.

I can’t say I know why Vista has failed, but ZDNet seems to know The top five reasons why Windows Vista failed. Their first reason “Apple successfully demonized Vista”:

Apple’s clever I’m a Mac ads have successfully driven home the perception that Windows Vista is buggy, boring, and difficult to use. After taking two years of merciless pummeling from Apple, Microsoft recently responded with it’s I’m a PC campaign in order to defend the honor of Windows. This will likely restore some mojo to the PC and Windows brands overall, but it’s too late to save Vista’s perception as a dud.

The marketing was good. But to say Vista failed because Apple had some good ads is absolutely ridiculous – even juvenile. True or not, you would never say “The Ford Focus could have been great car if only the Toyota Yaris didn’t have better TV commercials.” What petty nonsense.

The bottom line is that Apple’s ads and products resonate with people. Microsoft doesn’t.

As entertainment, the spots are good. Both are well-shot, well-cut, well-acted works of cinema. And they’re a radical departure for Microsoft insofar as they completely dropped the meaningless corporate doublespeak that’s been the hallmark of their advertising for the last decade.

But they “worked” only insofar as they said nothing and dropped the pretense of saying something. The spots said nothing and reveled in the nothingness.

Just well-made nothing. A couple of million bucks just burned up in well-produced style.

After David saw the ads, he concluded ”I liked Microsoft better when they were assholes”

It’s hard to imagine that the once mighty 800-pound gorilla in the room has been reduced to a mere monkey. A monkey with a $230B market cap, but a monkey no less.

And Waffle decides the ads should have been run in the 80′s:

More than anything, though, the new ad seems to have that terrific vibe of “computers — ain’t they quite the thing?”. I’m suspecting this would have worked much better one or two decades ago. We already know.

Maybe this is just all a marketing miss-step, but I for one believe the problem is much deeper: Microsoft has lost their way. What made them successful is not what will keep them successful and they need a change. Unfortunately, however, they haven’t figured this out yet.