Harish Palaniappan's

The software giant of yesterday, Microsoft corporation is probably become too old for the business. I have my reasons to say that.. been using microsoft products for much over 10 years, and being a software programmer and engineer myself, i have been observing their products, the list of changes that they call features in their new products, etc.,

Microsoft still maintains its benchmarks...

Comparing them to companies like google, or products like linux operating systems, would actually only mislead that Microsoft is still strong. but when you can see what they are creating these days, to their benchmark levels they used to have 4 or 5 years back on their products, you would see that their benchmark hasnt changed, they still have the same standards, which is the problem.

With growing demand for more automation in software, any interesting company, any alive company to put it straight, would only increase their standards or benchmarks, but microsoft i wonder is turned the other way and looking interested in only marketing.

Microsoft's top planning bosses aren't getting the facts. And with bill gates planning to relieve himself from active chairmanship in 2008, i feel from 2008 people will see Microsoft as only yet another small software company around the block rather than being an important / cohersive player in Technology.

"Hype wont sell anymore in software. ."

I wish (i can only wish) Microsoft's marketing stop being busy creating a hype around each and every feature they are including in the products, and let the product speak for itself, like other companies do.. like digg.com, or google's products.

Open-source goes brave

People are today bravely giving away a huge chunk of good work in free/open-source software, and every other company have started respecting this brave community.. and some companies have even started donating, or contributing to this community which is bringing the next boom to software sure down in 2008 or 2010.

Whereas, Microsoft, still doesn't want to recognize the open-source community as any valuable atleast officially. For marketing purposes though, Microsoft still tries to post technical capacity comparisons of their products with linux servers, or google like products etc.,

The very idea that microsoft compares its commercial products/services against a free/open-source product talks pages about Microsoft's benchmark levels.

How much alive is Microsoft Live?

The other day i was intrigued by the way microsoft's live mail beta was working.. it just was eating all the errors gracefully and failing without doing anything most times.. sure its mouth was full of errors.

"Eating your Cooking..."

I was happy that finally Microsoft people write code for their own intelligent browser IE developing the 'Live' services, and sure they are feeling the pinch in every painful part of that browser.

"First eat your cooking, then you know"... same things with Microsoft's Local, the mapping environment. sometimes they work good as comparable to Google Maps but sometimes they just dont respond.. (in the background that means they are hiding an error and keeping quiet as if nothing happened).

Microsoft's Hotmail and live team, the browser-based service developers should learn a 50 or 52 things from the way yahoo's new live mail, or google's services work.

Competing new areas...

Forgeting all these failures Microsoft seems busy trying to enter a new product area - MP3 players to compete with Apple's ipod. Sure, MP3 and many popular formats were actually initiated into the technology sector by Microsoft.. but those days are fine.. today "more" is word (not just for using in Microsoft Marketing campaigns but also in product functions and features).

Are Microsoft managers not seeing the failures at the end-point, or, are they ignoring all current customers and moving on to new ones..

Next what, compete with motorola and nokia and make micorosft mobile phones.??

Bottomline:

The company Microsoft is become old, and old thinkers are making stereo-type decisions in there... and the activity in the company is probably "stale".. i wonder microsoft is going to end-up stagnating for sometime like IBM was in the 1990's and we all know whats of IBM today (the just another hardware company).