Has Microsoft lost its vitality?
(Written in 2022)
Microsoft used to lead, but nowadays it seems to follow more and more. MS-DOS, BASIC, and Windows garnered unprecedented popularity. The Visual Studio development tool series inspired hundreds of thousands of programmers to develop applications for MS platforms. ASP.Net brought significant innovation in web application development. Unfortunately, in the past decade, we have seen that Microsoft literally lost its opportunity to play a dominant role in the smartphone OS arena. Windows Mobile and its predecessor came out many years ahead of iOS and Android. Now it owns only a fraction of the market.
Windows Phone 7 is a superb smartphone OS, but it came out after iPhone and Android had grabbed the majority of the market share. MVC, a solid platform for web applications, came out as the only major innovation 10 years after the release of ASP.Net, and after PHP had gained significant popularity. Silverlight was released 10 years behind Flash, and after the latter gained almost a 100% penetration rate.
To me, the most worrying sign is the deterioration of enthusiasm and competence of MS staff and the bureaucracy. I have seen very simple issues for which MS staff cannot provide competent responses. For example, a Windows Phone 7 app publisher registration issue with an MS website dragged on for almost a year. Ironically, MS paid more than half a billion dollars on marketing Windows Phone 7. I have made many web apps requiring user registration. I can guarantee any similar registration issue will be resolved in 24 hours, and I believe most other web app developers can, too.
MS has the potential and capability to restore its shining leadership in technologies. After all, it has a large pool of wonderful products - Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, SharePoint, SQL Server, and Visual Studio, ... Visual Studio is still the most productive software development tool, and a large number of programmers still stand behind MS. It is probably time to change the leadership team, and put innovation-oriented people with deep technical talent in charge of the ship.