PRESTON GRALLA
Microsoft Innovates But
Falls Short on Capitalizing
Too often,
Microsoft tries
to force-fit
innovations into
its Windows
universe.
QUICK QUIZ: Who developed a smartphone operating system first — Apple or Microsoft? Of the two, who released a tablet first? In both cases, it was Microsoft, and the race wasn’t even close. The Microsoft Tablet PC was announced in 2001, and tablets built
Preston Gralla is a
Computer world.com
contributing editor
and the author of
more than 35 books,
including How the
Internet Works
(Que, 2006).
to its specifications were released in 2002, eight
years before the iPad first appeared. That same
year, Microsoft Pocket PC 2002 was developed for
smartphones. (It later became Windows Mobile,
and now is Windows Phone.) Apple got around
to building its first smartphone, the iPhone, five
years later, in 2007.
Apple has long been portrayed as the technology
world’s leading innovator, coming up with visionary
ideas well before anyone else and creating entire
product categories from scratch. Microsoft has been
thought of as an unimaginative plodder, waiting for
others to develop innovations, and then coming in
with brute force and cornering the market with big
marketing budgets and smart business moves.
In fact, though, Microsoft has been out front
on a number of occasions. It’s not that it can’t innovate. It’s that it doesn’t do a good job of turning
innovations into market-changing products.
Take the Tablet PC. At the time, it was certainly
innovative. But Microsoft never figured out how
to make a marketable product out of it, largely
because the company thought about it as a traditional computer in a different form factor — essentially a tablet-based Windows PC. In a press release
at the time, Microsoft described it this way: “The
size of a legal notepad and half the weight of most
of today’s laptop PCs, the Tablet PC is a full-pow-ered, full-featured PC.” Full-priced, too, typically
costing $2,000. It wasn’t until Apple rethought
what a tablet should be — less expensive, app-driven and primarily for consuming content rather
than creating it — that the tablet market took off.
As for Pocket PC/ Windows Mobile, Microsoft
made a similar mistake. Rather than considering what the ideal smartphone operating system
would be, Microsoft tied the features and technology of the phone to Windows, an operating
system not well suited to a phone’s form factor and
features. Once again, Apple took a fresh look at
what a phone should be able to do, and essentially
created the consumer smartphone market.
There’s a common thread to both of these
Microsoft innovations that ended up as failures:
Microsoft tried to force-fit them into its Windows
universe, rather than consider what consumers
would truly want in them. That’s where Apple
excels. It didn’t build the first tablet, the first
smartphone or the first portable music player. But
it intuited what people wanted in them, knew
when the market was right for releasing them, and
then did a superb job of engineering them.
This isn’t to say that Microsoft never gets it
right, or isn’t capable of getting it right. The best
example of that is the Kinect, a remarkable marriage of motion-sensing technology and intelligence used to control the Xbox 360 with movement, gestures and voice. It’s been a hit not only in
the market, but also among researchers at universities and with hardware hackers everywhere.
Kinect wasn’t developed as an adjunct to
Windows. That freed Microsoft to start its development with a clean slate. Microsoft needs to find
a way to do the same with other products, or else
it will remain an innovative company that can’t
capitalize on its innovations. u
