Why Microsoft is failing

The New York Times has a fascinating op-ed today written by Dick Brass, the guy who tried to make tablet PCs and e-readers take off at Microsoft around the time of the dotcom bubble. It looks at why Microsoft is being out-innovated by companies like Apple and Google.

In it he says the reason lots of cool ideas were either delayed or never made it to the outside world at Microsoft while he was there was internal politics. Stakeholders in one part of the business weren't always happy when an innovation in another part of the business was getting all the attention.

The reason this is topical is that, once more, Apple seems to have succeeded in an area where Microsoft tried and failed for years - the tablet. He documents opposition from the VP for Office when he was developing the tablet, who refused to properly modify Office apps to work with the tablet format.

While he also points to a cautious corporate culture brought about by the anti-trust action of the late 90s, and we don't know what kind of axe Brass might have to grind, it's still a great insight into how even the most apparently omnipotent companies can drop the ball.

Some interesting context is provided by this piece, written almost ten years ago when Brass was in the middle of pushing the tablet concept as Microsoft.

Pirate radio

I'm just listening to a piece on ethics in journalism on Radio 4 and ITV's Angus Walker is talking through his role in reporting the story on the UK couple kidnapped by Somali pirates.

The interviewer asked Walker how he managed to secure a phone call with one of the kidnapees. "I was having my dinner and the pirates called me," he said.

Amazing.

iPad aftermath

Intriguingly contradictory.

On one hand, most people are disappointed with the many missing features on Apple's new gizmo and, perhaps more fundamentally, that it's not going to redefine computing/change the world/cure cancer.

In spite of all that, however, most people seem to agree that it does mark a profound punctuation point in the evolution of the computer and that it's changing the way the mass market looks at mobile computing.

I must admit to considerable schadenfreude seeing Apple have the piss taken out of it so savagely over the launch, but it may have seeded the mobile Internet device market in the same say it did the smartphone market with the iPhone.

Yay - did it

So I deleted the old account I'd set up on MaStory and created a new one, this time entering the URL rather than the name of the blog, even though there were no instructions to do so, and that did the trick.

Posting from a mobile

I spend a lot of time writing about the mobile Internet but much less actually using the devices.

That has now changed as I've been sent an N900 by Nokia, from which I'm writing the first post on this new blog using an app I downloaded.

So far so good but I wouldn't want to type all day on this little keyboard, perfectly adequate though it is.

Could be easier

Just tried to post to this blog from a Nokia N900 using an app called MaStory, but it's not working. I must be doing something wrong. Hmmm.

This is the type of growing pain that's putting off users as implied in this story a week ago: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/01/23/uk_mobile_internet_data.

Still, I'm writing this from an iGoogle gadget, so that's something.