Comment by cjsuk
8 years ago
I see a lot of people going on about incentives. Actually the simple problem is that MSFT know how to effectively fuck up a product:
1. Schizophrenic product direction.
2. Entire platform change half way through.
3. Quality control issues galore.
4. Regional issues galore.
5. Reinventing wheels, badly.
It's just crap. That's happening to windows 10 too. It's just not quite as far down the toilet.
I think part of the problem is that they actually try to push innovation (e.g. new UI paradigms with Metro), but then run into several vocal minorities, backtrack a bit and try to find a middle ground. From the outside, it then looks like a random zig-zag course, but it's much more an iterative minimization of "mean square pain" among their fairly large user base.
Communication could often be better though.
I think it's more that they hire personalities and form personality cults. Personality cults can't be seen to fail by investors due to the CYA culture so they just burn off a cliff and explode when they hit the bottom of the ravine.