http://blogs.reuters...icrosoft-edition/

Guy English has already characterized Ballmer’s disastrous reorganization as a straitjacket for the next CEO; adding on a mobile phone business that Microsoft probably should abandon is like attaching an anchor to said straitjacket and tossing the patient into the ocean. It will be that much more difficult for the next CEO to look at Windows Phone rationally.

As Henry Blodget notes, Windows Phone is now going to account for a good quarter of Microsoft’s employees; integrating those two huge and very different cultures is going to take an enormous amount of effort, with no guarantee of success. And as Thompson notes, this acquisition essentially forces Microsoft to double down on its strategy (which has signally failed to date) of competing head-to-head with Android and iOS.

There is really zero consumer demand for an alternative smartphone OS: even the ultrageeks fell well short of raising the $32 million they needed to develop a version of Ubuntu for phones. Microsoft is pretty good at giving big organizations what they want — Windows and Office, the two great powerhouses which have between them accounted for all of Microsoft’s profits over the years. And somewhere, deep inside its institutional memory, it knows that once upon a time it came late to the browser game, entered with a big splash, and ended up demolishing Netscape.

The problem is that this second-mover strategy doesn’t work against Google and Apple. It doesn’t work in search, it doesn’t work in tablets, it doesn’t work in phones. (It has arguably worked in gaming systems, which is something of a Pyrrhic victory, given the way in which games are going mobile.) Nokia is a failing company — if Microsoft hadn’t swept in to save it, it would probably have gone bust pretty quickly — and one of the reasons that it’s failing is that no one wants to buy a Windows phone. And that’s especially true in the fastest-growing market of all.

[...]

He sorta thinks they're doomed. ;-)

He overstates the case a little (Apple wasn't first in smart phones; Elop was only at MS for a couple of years before going to Nokia; etc.), but I think the general tone is right. It's hard to see what Nokia is going to bring to MS that will give them a significant future (50 MP phones? Samsung can do the same thing anytime they want. Little animated boxes on the phone's main screen? Yawn.)

MS still thinks they are entitled to 100% of every market they want to be in. They still haven't recognized yet that the rest of the world learned from the OS Wars and the Word Processor Wars and the Database Wars and the Programming Tool Wars - you don't tie your company's future to MS if you want to survive. That's why their Search and Advertising and TV and Phone and Music Player and Cable TV and Subscription Software and ... efforts have been poorly accepted.

Lots of smart people work at MS, and they can make good stuff on occasion. But they need to change their culture in dealing with their customers and the rest of the world. It may take breaking up the OS / Office / Networking / Database / Game / Online / Phone / etc. groups into separate companies or something to let them all shine. Dunno.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elop#Career

Elop was a director of consulting for Lotus Development Corporation before becoming CIO for Boston Chicken in 1992,[8][9] which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998.[10] In the same year, he joined Macromedia's Web/IT department[9] and worked at the company for seven years,[11] where he held several senior positions, including CEO from January 2005[12] for three months before their acquisition by Adobe Systems was announced in April 2005.[5][13]

He was then president of worldwide field operations at Adobe, tendering his resignation in June 2006 and leaving in December,[14] after which he was the COO of Juniper Networks for exactly one year from January 2007-2008.[9][15]

From January 2008 to September 2010, Elop worked for Microsoft as the head of the Business Division, responsible for the Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics line of products, and as a member of the company's senior leadership team. It was during this time that Microsoft's Business Division released Office 2010.[16]

In September 2010, it was announced that Elop would take Nokia's CEO position, replacing Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, and becoming the first non-Finnish director in Nokia's history. On 11 March 2011 Nokia announced that it had paid Elop a $6 million signing bonus, “compensation for lost income from his prior employer," on top of his $1.4 million annual salary.[17]

On 3 September 2013, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nokia's Devices and Services division for €3.79 billion ($4.99 billion at the time of the transaction). Elop stepped down as CEO of Nokia and will return to Microsoft as Head of Microsoft's Devices team.[18]

Man, he fell up on to that fast-track, huh?!? If he's the next CEO, it's hard for me to see him making MS into a behemoth again - maybe he'll break the company up and collect a huge windfall in the process. Dunno...

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.

They thought that the blue lasers were going to be easier to perfect than they ended up being, so yields were low and costs were high in their BluRay players that were one of the big selling-points of the box. ("Buy this inexpensive game machine and get a free Blu-Ray player!")

The Cell processors were a big risk for them, too.

I think it's great that Sony was willing to push the technology and take risks like that. The hardware behind PS4 and XBone seems to be much more conventional (even if the graphics performance, etc., is much higher than the predecessors).

It'll be interesting to see if they're as popular as the earlier boxes.

I'm tempted to look into one mainly for the mediaplayer aspects (we haven't even downloaded any TV shows yet even though we've got Amazon Prime). We're paying over $200 a month for cable TV and internet and it's tempting to find ways to cut that expense down some... Or maybe a Chromecast dongle, or ... But I'm often on the trailing edge of technology now - the hep cats probably do everything on their phones now, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were canceled 3 months after we bought one. ;-)

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.