kottke.org posts about Microsoft
Since the introduction of the iPhone, Apple has ruled the December holidays. Under the tree, by the menorah, and around the Festivus pole has appeared a steady stream of iPods, iPhones, iTunes gift cards, iPod touches, and even MacBooks. Apple has sold tons of devices in the final quarter of the last three years and, with the iPad added to the lineup, will likely do so again this year.
But I think two companies who will do even better than Apple in December this year.
The first is Amazon**. The cheapest Kindle is now only $139 (and the one with free 3G is $50 more). They are going to sell a metric crapload of these things this Christmas. And even if they don’t, they’re going to sell 50 million metric shitloads of Kindle books because you don’t even need a Kindle to read Kindle books…Amazon has readers for the iPad (which is way better than Apple’s iBooks app IMO), iPhone, Android devices, Blackberry, WinPhone 7, Windows, and OS X. I never would have predicted it, but I am a firm convert to Kindle books…and I don’t even have a Kindle. The killer feature here is Amazon’s multi-platform support. I *love* reading books on the iPad at home but when I’m out and about, if I’ve got my iPhone in my pocket, I can read a book. The best book is the one that’s always with you.
This one is more of a guess, but the other company that will do well this holiday season is Microsoft. I know, right? But have you seen this Kinect thing? It’s an add-on for Xbox 360 that takes everything people loved about the Wii and Wii Fit and makes it easier, more natural, and more powerful. Basically you hook this bar up to your Xbox 360 and it tracks your motion around the room. You’re the controller. Here’s a snippet from David Pogue’s positive review:
The Wii, by tracking the position of its remote control, was amazing for its time (2006). It’s a natural for games in which you swing one hand — bowling, tennis, golf. But the Kinect blows open a whole universe of new, whole-body simulations — volleyball, obstacle courses, dancing, flying.
It doesn’t merely recognize that someone is there; it recognizes your face and body. In some games, you can jump in to take a buddy’s place; the game instantly notices the change and signs you in under your own name. If you leave the room, it pauses the game automatically.
There’s a crazy, magical, omigosh rush the first time you try the Kinect. It’s an experience you’ve never had before.
The Kinect is available at Amazon (hey, there they are again…) bundled with Xbox 360 for $300 and separately for $150.
Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, published in 2004, contained the following footnote:
If the Mac was so great, why did it lose? Cost, again Microsoft concentrated on the software business and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. It did not help either that suits took over during a critical period. (And it hasn’t lost yet. If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.)
Then again, a few footnotes later Graham writes:
I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn’t. Most of the Javascript I see on the Web isn’t necessary, and much of it breaks. And when you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or toaster), who knows if they’ll even support it.
Maybe he meant Flash? (via oddhead)
After posting the Apple stock purchase vs. Apple product purchase thing this afternoon, I thought, hey, Microsoft’s stock went up a bunch after Windows 95 came out so I’ll figure out how much the software’s purchase price would be worth in Microsoft stock today. The answer was not very exciting as you can see from this graph courtesy of Google Finance:
Since the Windows 95 launch, Microsoft’s stock has only (only!) quadrupled in value while Apple’s stock has increased by more than 24 times. 24 times! That kind of growth is remarkable for a company that had already been public for 15 years and, everyone assumed, had already been through their boom time. Of course, what goes up can easily come down…
I stuck Google in there for good measure. It doesn’t show as much growth as you’d think because GOOG’s IPO-day closing price made it a very large company from the start…the chart hides Google’s pre-IPO growth in value. But still, look at how much Apple’s stock price has grown in comparison to Google’s since the latter’s IPO. (For fun, add Yahoo into the mix and dial the graph back to 1996.)
Greg Knauss on how the New York Yankees are like Microsoft.
But, wait… Two-thousand was — the last time the Yankees managed to win a championship. And it was awfully close to the last time that that Microsoft managed to produce a version of Windows that anybody cared about. And, hey, both the Yankees and Microsoft have long histories of dominating their professions, and of using that dominance to run up huge payrolls with — let’s be honest here — a near-decade of lackluster results.
It’s an uncanny resemblance.
From John Gruber, an Apple booster, an essay on Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline. And, is if in reply, an essay called Apple: Secrecy Does Not Scale from Anil Dash, Microsoft enthusiast. A perhaps unsubtle reply to both essays might be “I can’t hear you over the continual sounds of the cash register”…MS and Apple continue to be enormously profitable doing business the way they do.
After I heard Microsoft’s announcement of yet-another-interation of their search engine (named Bing), I went to look at the stats for kottke.org for the past month to see how many visitors each search engine sent to the site. I couldn’t believe how dominant Google was.
Google | 262,946 | 93.8%
MS Live | 4,307 | 1.5%
Yahoo | 4,036 | 1.4%
MSN | 2,796 | 1.0%
It’s a small sample and doesn’t match up with Comscore’s numbers (Google: 64.2%, Yahoo: 20.4%, MS: 8.2%), but wow. As a comparison, the numbers for a year ago for kottke.org had Google at 91%, Yahoo at 4.9%, and Live at 0.7%.
The new version of Microsoft Silverlight (their answer to Flash, a question that no one asked) has a feature called Deep Zoom that Playboy is going to use to provide free access to 54 full issues of Playboy magazine.
After EXTENSIVE testing, I have determined that Silverlight’s Zoom isn’t nearly so Deep as one can imagine. (via jimray)
We all had a healthy laugh earlier in the month when someone took the vocal track from Van Halen’s Runnin’ With The Devil and ran it through Microsoft Songsmith, creating an automatic and unusual musical accompaniment for David Lee Roth’s tortured vocals. Since then, people have done this with all sorts of songs and they’re all pretty bad. Surprisingly, Wonderwall by Oasis works really well as a techno song. (thx, rob)
Songsmith is a piece of software by Microsoft Research that automatically creates a musical accompaniment to a singer’s voice. (The intro video is priceless.) A MetaFilter member took David Lee Roth’s vocal track from Runnin’ With The Devil and put it through Songsmith…the results are pretty great. (thx, shay)
After a couple of teasers starring Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft is airing some new ads that take Apple’s “I’m a PC” out into the real world. So instead of John Hodgman’s dorky PC character (who is parodied in one of the new ads), they’ve got all sorts of people — basketball players, actresses, scientists, fashion designers, etc. — proudly declaring “I’m a PC”. As Michael Sippey mentions, the ads do communicate a “message of joy and abundance and widespread use of Personal Computing”, but they’re not “great”.
I briefly worked for a design firm in the late 90s that did a lot of advertising work. One of the hard and fast rules in the office — which was taken from a book written by a successful ad man whose name I cannot recall — was that if a company was #1 in a certain space, their advertising should never ever mention the competition, not even in an oblique fashion. And even if a company was #2, they should do the same and act as if they were #1.
That’s the problem with Microsoft’s ads. They’re still #1 and the bigger company, but by referencing Apple’s successful ad campaign, they’re acting like Apple is #1. (John Gruber made this same point the other day.) The ads fail because they serve to remind people that Apple comes up with good ideas that Microsoft then takes and shapes into something that so-called “normal people” can use or understand. Except that this isn’t 1993. With the iPod, iPhone, iMac, OS X, the Apple Stores, and the iTunes Store, Apple has their finger firmly on the pulse of what normal people want and Microsoft’s recent attempts (the Zune, Vista) to keep up by emulating Apple have failed. If MS had created the “I’m a PC” message on their own, the ads would be great, but these copy-and-paste ads lack soul and are merely “eh”.
What’s interesting is that with the I’m a Mac/I’m a PC ads, Apple mentions Microsoft explicitly, over and over, proving the old adage that rules are made to be broken. What works in Apple’s favor is that they are the #2 company and were clever about how they attacked #1. Microsoft’s hamfisted ads are almost saying to Apple, “nuh-uh, my mom thinks I’m cool” while the image of Hodgman’s frumpy PC is hard to shake and makes Windows seem lame without being overly insulting about it.
The iconic photo from 1978 of Microsoft’s founders and early employees has been reshot.
Present for the reunion was office manager Miriam Lubow (center of new picture), who missed the original sitting due to a snowstorm. (When Lubow, now retired, first met Gates, she couldn’t believe that disheveled kid was the president.) Absent for the reshoot was Bob Wallace (top center), who died in 2002; after leaving Microsoft in 1983, he pioneered the idea of shareware.
They should submit this to Ze Frank’s Youngme/Nowme.
The big tech/business news of the day is Yahoo’s stock “plunge” following the withdrawl of Microsoft’s takeover offer. I’m sure plunge headlines sell newspapers and all, but the more long-term story is more interesting.
On Jan 31, the day before Microsoft offered $31/share for Yahoo, YHOO was at $19.18/share (market cap: $26.4 billion) and MSFT was at $32.60/share (market cap: $303.6 billion). At the close of trading today, YHOO closed at $24.37/share (market cap: $33.5 billion) and MSFT was at $29.08/share (market cap: $270.8 billion). In other words, the Microsoft offer increased the value of Yahoo! Inc. by more than $7 billion and decreased the value of Microsoft Corporation by almost $33 billion. In still other words, in attempting to take Yahoo by force, they let an amount equal to Yahoo slip through their fingers. Why isn’t anyone writing about Yahoo’s amazing stock gains and Microsoft’s plunge?
You know what’s dumb about the “SoAndSo Company is the Next Google” headlines. But do you know what’s *really* dumb about the “SoAndSo Company is the Next Google” headlines? Before Google became the company whose success everyone was chasing, it was Microsoft. Before that, it was IBM. That’s it, three companies since 1960. What are the chances it’s going to happen again anytime soon? (Nothing against Etsy, but this is the one that set me off.)
Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion. This sounds like a horrible deal…big mergers/acquisitions like these often don’t work well.
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