It's really not a question of Microsoft's specific branding strategy but an indication of how opposed Microsoft's big, bloated bureaucratic culture to the modern, fast, lean technological era we are proceeding in.
One thing that really upsets me and frustrates me more and more is how intensely complicated and centralized the environment is for Microsoft. You have this version, that version this technology, that technology clients and communication softwares that support this and that. I get it Microsoft, you're huge.
But because it's so huge it makes it so much more difficult to penetrate. Thus, when other companies make swift decisions to penetrate specific parts of their market and chip away at their usage or establish new markets which undercut Microsoft's existing market prowess (disruption), Microsoft goes crazy with these rebranding techniques.
When Microsoft does pursue a new brand (or rebrands an existing service), they, as per their culture, bloat their initiatives into these big, massive sweeps. However, these massive sweeps are generally empty, confusing and deliberately ambiguous because I don't think that Microsoft weighs the consumer input versus their own internal goals. I don't think they even bothered with really empirically (via iteration, for example) discovering what the service was for because, as Microsoft does, they spend months-years working on these big projects and release them, hoping that people just eat them like they do Windows.
I think the market context for the way Windows is sold to consumers (big, sweeping changes) is very different to the rest of their products. Phones, web products, runtime environments are very substitutable and the resources to product companies that make these products are becoming more and more democratized. As such, a company like Microsoft really doesn't have the kind of stranglehold that it does. That's why things like Live suck and don't make sense. Microsoft is trying to push this top-down because they think we don't know what we want.
Bottom line: I think Steve Ballmer can take a really good cue from Eric Ries on why lean startups work well and disrupt the way they do.
One thing that really upsets me and frustrates me more and more is how intensely complicated and centralized the environment is for Microsoft. You have this version, that version this technology, that technology clients and communication softwares that support this and that. I get it Microsoft, you're huge.
But because it's so huge it makes it so much more difficult to penetrate. Thus, when other companies make swift decisions to penetrate specific parts of their market and chip away at their usage or establish new markets which undercut Microsoft's existing market prowess (disruption), Microsoft goes crazy with these rebranding techniques.
When Microsoft does pursue a new brand (or rebrands an existing service), they, as per their culture, bloat their initiatives into these big, massive sweeps. However, these massive sweeps are generally empty, confusing and deliberately ambiguous because I don't think that Microsoft weighs the consumer input versus their own internal goals. I don't think they even bothered with really empirically (via iteration, for example) discovering what the service was for because, as Microsoft does, they spend months-years working on these big projects and release them, hoping that people just eat them like they do Windows.
I think the market context for the way Windows is sold to consumers (big, sweeping changes) is very different to the rest of their products. Phones, web products, runtime environments are very substitutable and the resources to product companies that make these products are becoming more and more democratized. As such, a company like Microsoft really doesn't have the kind of stranglehold that it does. That's why things like Live suck and don't make sense. Microsoft is trying to push this top-down because they think we don't know what we want.
Bottom line: I think Steve Ballmer can take a really good cue from Eric Ries on why lean startups work well and disrupt the way they do.