Hans Hoffmann's Blog

CES 2012

Published on January 13, 2012 by hansh51Leave a comment

Well this has been the week of the big Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in the glamorous city of Las Vegas. It is a show, sad to say, I have never been to but would love to go someday. Still with today’s interactive technologies it is pretty easy to follow from far away. The great thing about CES is that it gives consumers a window n how they might spend their money in the upcoming year. Or not. Last year was a big year for 3-D TV’s, but I don’t think consumers were ready to give up their new LCD or Plasma screens just yet to experience 3-D at home. This year promises a whole host of new gadgets and who knows what will be the biggest. But it is always fun to hear what the big industry players are planning. Even more exciting can be the young start-ups.

This year, as always, CES started with the keynote from Steve Ballmer, the loud and proud CEO of Microsoft. Of course the big news had already broke, this would be Microsoft’s last CES. This was the last chance to see Steve. It was a draw and then Steve went on to present, uh, well, nothing really at all. Most of which he talked about had already been announced in previous talks about Windows 8 and Windows Phone. The biggest announcement was really that Nokia was coming back to America with the Lumia 900. It is sad to see Microsoft leave the event. I am not thrilled that they have chosen to do big releases via internal style events and over the web. My preference is in person events but I may be a bit old school in that thinking. The problem I have with over the web is it usually means at a desk at work where there are many distractions. Such as Bob’s vacation or Steve i snot happy at work or..well you get the picture. You may see higher numbers but how many people are really engaged in what they are hearing and seeing? In any case we bid Microsoft a fond farewell.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt participated in a “pseudo” panel. Not sure what kind of panel this was intended to be as it sounded like a group of Google partners just nodding their heads to everything Eric said. But there were some valid discussion points, mainly the idea of ubiquity between connected devices. Just think of it this way..walk around your home and see how many devices, appliances etc have digital displays. You would find dishwashers, washer and dryer, clocks, stereo’s, etc..They should all be talking to one another and to the cloud. And according to Eric they should be built on a foundations of, drum roll please…Android. To be clear this idea is nothing new. Microsoft had this idea of Microsoft @Home over ten years ago. Novell had its embedded systems technology(NEST). But like so many things in technology it is not predicting the future, it is timing the future. As Eric points out with mobility and wireless pretty much everywhere making this “connected” home is much closer to reality. Google is taking the lead. Lets see how soon others begin to follow.

The term Gorilla Glass was new to me but it made a splash as Sony showed a Viao made out of Gorilla Glass v2. First question o I want a laptop made of glass? It will be a little bit heavier, but the environmentalist in me asks the second question: Is it recyclable? IN any case they did show hat this glass could withstand 120 pounds of pressure making it fairly durable. Given how often I drop things this is a good thing. From a pure aesthetics standpoint it would seem you would be able to do some pretty fancy stuff with color. I think more than anything this highlights advances being made in the materials that make up our technology toys. A good thing and though not “sexy” now it will be in the future.

When we look at the best in show winners there, as usual is some interesting stuff. Kudos to Nokia for coming through with the best smartphone of the show the Nokia Lumia 900. The Asus Memo 370T Tablet running Android and priced for $250. It has 16bg storage, oh how far we have come. The features are nice and with those low price points it makes total sense. I found the best software app, Bluestack interesting. It brings all 400,000 Android apps to Windows 8. It used to be the other way around, with competing platforms looking to run Windows Apps. Remember Apple had dual OS capabilities. If you want to be a real old-timer who remembers IBM OS/2 v2.0 with the Windows Subsystem? To be fair these type of subsystems traditionally ran slow and were painful. I would hope that Bluestack brings something new to the table and is…fast. Which it should be ok at since Android Apps for phones and Tablets are not like running Microsoft Office. Size matters. One thing to note Bluestack is not yet in beta. Murmur.

My summary of what I have read and followed about CES is there was a lot of focus on Tablets. A lot of new and upcoming releases tied to Windows 8 and Android. The one thing I am interested to see when Windows 8 Tablets roll out is cost. It seems like Apple has staked out the high ground and Android the low ground, and both have lots of applications. Is the middle ground a viable place to be? On the TV front I think we are waiting for the next big revolution. Google did some talk about interactive television, however we are not there yet. Apple has been strangely silent of lat in this topic. But I expect them to bet big on Television. I do expect in the next 2-3 years for this to be a huge focus of CES. The interesting question and one of great anticipation is who will lead. Overall though this was not a great year at CES as there was no break through announcements. No technology that came out and said this is what will be big in 2012, right or wrong (think 3-D TV). Looking at the products it was more claims of, “This will be a big improvement on what currently exists”. Take your pick, Tablets, Smartphones, mobile gaming etc…Next year will be bigger with Windows 8, though I don’t hear of anything ground breaking coming from Redmond…yet. But what we want from CES is not an upgrade but something that changes how we experience life.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann January 13, 2012

Windows Phone..where are we today

Published on January 9, 2012 by hansh51Leave a comment

Mobility is always one of the topics I like to write most about as I find the world fascinating. From the carrier networks and billing systems down to the actual consumer devices. I was at Microsoft in Bldg 117, home of Microsoft Mobility, when the first Windows Phone was released. I had every Windows Phone OS from v1.0 on up to 6.5. I won’t go through the whole history, but needless to say, things started to fall apart for the Microsoft Phone business after the release of the Apple iPhone. With the latest release of Windows Phone, code-named Mango and the flowering relationship with Nokia, Microsoft at long last seems in a position to compete with Apple and Google. However so far Windows Phone, despite every positive reviews seems to be at a cross roads.

Recently former Microsoft Windows Phone GM, Charles Kindel on his blog wrote about his thoughts as to why, despite in his view, WP7 is a superior product, sales were so lack luster. Though I don’t agree with all his points some are very valid. He highlights four areas of the mobile eco system. They are as follows:

Carriers
Device Manufacturers
OS Providers
Users
Developer **

As noted in his blog he intentionally left the developer community off the list, but I shall add it back in. So there you have it 5.

Carriers are kind of the Mitt Romney of tech, he wants to be popular to the conservative base of voters but he is not. The carriers want to be like Silicon Valley, but they are not. Telco execs are closer to Depends than Huggies. Silicon Valley kids are definitely in the Huggie category. Carriers at the end of the day own the last mile to the customer. Any service for mobile devices will run through them. They get us all connected. It’s exciting stuff. That being said no one gets excited by their carrier. High School kids do not say they are cool now that they have Verizon Wireless. Kids are excited by the device and the functionality it provides them. Voice and data plans are a necessary evil. The only talking points are quality of service and the cost of the service. But make no mistake these old boys wield a lot of power and would like nothing better than to be recognized as “cool” for it. If you want your device sold you have to play with them…unless you are Apple which managed to dictate their own terms. This leads us to the next category.

Device Manufacturers do some of the really cool stuff that make the handsets we buy..well cool. But how do carriers select which handset they will place in their storefronts and promote? Well we have two different approaches. One is very monolithic and takes control away from the carriers. That of course would be Apple. Apple s the only device manufacturer that I can think of that was able to dictate how their phone would be sold , which at first was sold exclusively through AT&T. Steve Jobs knew he had broken new ground when Apple created the iPhone. It was a leap-frog step in mobile phones. He knew it and he negotiated it. AT&T sold voice and data plans for the iPhone, but Apple got the rest, including the App Store. All AT&T could hope for was that the iPhone would drive more subscribers to their network. It did. a lot of new subscribers. On the flip side is Google and what they have done with Android. Buy a mobile OS, leverage open source and let device manufacturers create. It was a good plan that gave some leading handset manufacturers cool software so that they could compete and sell against the iPhone. Quickly HTC went from being a dominant Windows Phone shop to a dominant Android shop. Other handset manufactures fell quickly into line such as Samsung and Motorola. Device manufactures had the flexibility to innovate and not have to adhere to a rigid set of software design practices. Charles Kindel highlighted this in his blog and I am in strong agreement with him on this. Microsoft has not done this and it has caused friction with device manufacturers. The carriers liked this model as it was less friction between the carriers and device manufactures. It gave carriers more variety to sell and also more inexpensive devices. Cost was an area where Google could innovate and compete with Apple.

For the providers of OS’s there are primarily three: Apple, Google and Microsoft. Apple is a walled garden or prison cell, which ever analogy you prefer. Google is on the flip side as it pursued more the open source model and courted developers heavily to their Android platform. I flatter Microsoft by putting them here as they are around 2% in terms of market share, but they have over $30 billion in cash so I guess I should. Operating systems, whether they are on a tablet, laptop, phone or other don’t matter as much as the makers would like to think. But they do enable our experiences so to minimize them would also be wrong. Really Apple is a soup to nuts shop so they own hardware and software design, Google and Microsoft differ in approach and cost. Google has a better developer model and doe snot cost. Microsoft is less open and does charge for the OS to hand set manufacturers. In my view these two things will slow down their progress in the market place and to get to a substantial market share is going to be a hard journey.

Users in the end decide where they want to invest their money. Sp much of what they invest is not necessarily for cool features and cutting edge technology. It is for how the product makes them feel. Don’t get me wrong all the technical stuff is very important in making the end product successful, but at the end of the day users want to feel good. Apple has been far and away the best at this. Android is good, but it is a cheap alternative to Apple. Though Charles Kindel claims the Windows Phone is the best bar none, it is hard to substantiate when it’s hard to find anyone (as of yet) who owns one. My view is tainted toward the positive as I live in Seattle so I have plenty of Microsoft employees happy to show me all the cool features. Note to Microsoft employees here. Stop showing features and hand the phone to whomever you are talking to, so they can “experience” the phone. Feature demo’s are for geeks.

Finally we come to developers. The are the Windows Phone is weakest in. Remember Steve Ballmer saying, “Developers, Developers, Developers” . Apparently he forgot. Recently Apple hit 500,000 applications, Google has a few hundred thousand. Microsoft announced they hit 50,000.. Apple amazed me as they used Object C as the development language for the iOS. I sold C compilers in the early nineties. It seemed dead. However after the release of the iPhone it went from dead to one of the top ten programming languages. Developers g where the money is. The development language they use is secondary. Google use of open source made sense, since the open source community is a whole lot of developers at heart. It’s a large community so leverage their brain power. Which brings us back to the Microsoft developer. Who is Microsoft asking to write Windows Phone apps? Simple the large and robust Microsoft developer community and yet they are still not even visible in the rear view mirror of Apple and Google. Why? For starters mobile apps are simple and cheap. It is based on a high volume lower margin principle. Plus a lot of Microsoft developers are not targeting consumer apps. One of two things has to happen. Either Microsoft has to create enough consumer demand for Windows Phone to bring developers over to Microsoft or they need to attract non-Microsoft developers to the Microsoft brand. Not easy but it has to be done.

In the long run I expect that Microsoft will pour enough money into Windows Phone to drive some success, but how much and what is deemed a success is to be determined. I think short-term it makes more sense for Microsoft to go after Google and Android as Apple has extremely high consumer satisfaction. A recent study cited 85% of Apple iPhone users would buy Apple again. Android is ow cost but it is also in danger of fragmenting as the OS layer as more handset manufactures modify the OS , thus creating apps that are compatible on some devices but not all. This needs to happen fast as Android sales are sky rocketing. Microsoft and Nokia will have a successful launch and Windows Phone will increase in market share (how much?!?), but the next big question will be can it create and sustain momentum? Though Charles Kindel claims the Windows Phone is the best mobile phone on the planet, that does not translate into success. Technology is littered with products that were deemed the best and yet failed to catch on. It is early for Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft is way late to the game. Their key partner, Nokia, is making a last stand with the Microsoft mobile platform. In the mean time Apple and Google have not slowed down. It seems impossible to overcome. But what does Microsoft have to lose except for ….the future.

Good Night and Good Luck.

Hans Henrik Hoffmann – January 9, 2012

Windows 9

Published on December 19, 2011 by hansh51Leave a comment

Is it “Back to the Future”? No, I am just starting to think about ahead to the future of Windows. There is a little bit out there on the internet that we can point to regarding plans post Windows 8 which is set to ship god knows when. But it makes for an interesting discussion. One blog I found references a few things about the possible Windows 9 principles. First it will be 64 bit only. 2:) There will be no legacy support. 3:) There will be only one OS 4:) There will be one user interface. A lot of this was discussed at the Worldwide Partner Conference earlier this year so these are not shocking details but it does make for an interesting discussion and speculation.

Starting with 64 bit only I am not sure this is as big of deal, as for example when Windows 95 came out, which was 32 bit. When the industry moved from 16 bit to 32 bit the issue of compatibility wad important. There were a lot of 16 bit Windows apps that would need to be supported. Microsoft came up with Win32s (subsystem) in order to support those older applications. In those days if you were a developer writing exciting applications you were writing to the Windows API’s. This was before the web had taken off. In order for an application to perform it needed Windows. Moving forward to today’s developer environment, though still important, Windows is not the center of the development universe. Developers are writing applications for the internet, meaning that consumption is through the browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox etc..). Don’t get me wrong the decision (if true) to move to 64 but only will be a bit painful. However there will not be as many applications that need to be moved to 64 bit in comparison to the jump from 16 bit to 32 bit. There should be ample ramp up time. We should see performance benefits from 64 bit, but in the end I believe due to the web this will be a non-event for both Microsoft and the industry.

The move to 64 bit makes the “no legacy” support a non-issue. If you have an app that is dependent on Windows you are one of the few. Over 70% of new development targets the web. With more services being pushed to the cloud our PC’s are starting to resemble, dare I say, dumb terminals. For device manufacturers this may be a bit more challenging as all device drivers will need to be updated. So if you have a HP printer connected to Windows 7 or 8 and you buy a new PC but not a new printer, you will need a device driver written for 64 but. Seems trivial to those who know what they are doing but most people don’t know where to find an update driver. This will in the short run create support challenges for many and likely some PR disasters along the way, but we shall overcome.

One OS for all. It seems like I have been here before back when Microsoft was shipping Windows and Windows NT. There was a push to have a consolidated client operating system. The world is a bit different now with the proliferation of different device form factors. We now have Tablets, SmartPhones, Desktops, Laptops and new devices on the way. So the question is how broad do you want to be when you say one OS for all? Windows 8 already promises to be the desktop, laptop and tablet OS. I guess that leaves the Windows Phone with is sitting over in a different organization at Microsoft, The Interactive Entertainment Business Group (IEB). The group that owns the XBOX. As I have said before this will not be a long discussion. In the end Windows always wins. Windows Phone will have a new home in the next couple of years. The key element in all this to me will be release cycles of the OS. Phones and Tablets in the industry usually have new releases every year. A desktop is every three years. Ina society where technology is consumer driven and these more aggressive life cycles are the norm, this will be the single biggest challenge of one OS.

Finally tagging on to that is the idea of one user interface. My phone will look and feel like my laptop. My tablet will feel like my phone. Who knows what new devices and form factors lay on the horizon, but one thing is clear. When we see Windows 9 the landscape will have changed yet again. It is an interesting and predictable view from Microsoft. But these ideas seem to much like an upgrade, a rather evil terms by today’s standards. The idea of comfort. It is something you are familiar with and feel at home with. It is the Windows user interface. With Windows 8 the user interface is set to change with the introduction of the Metro interface. A step in the right direction. However Metro is taken from the Windows Phone experience, which is not built on the Windows code. So the circle continues to morph into new and unexpected shapes. When Windows 9 ships I do not expect Metro to be the user interface. A bold prediction if I do dare say so myself.

In the end I do believe what we have “heard” so far is a good foundation for the future of Windows. As I have stated it raises a number of questions. Some internal to Microsoft and political. Some are yet to be known as we do not know where the industry will be 3-5 years from now and what direction it has taken. Others will be dependent on the success or failure of Windows 8, specifically in the tablet space. If it succeeds expect the Windows division to consolidate and own all OS experiences within Microsoft. If it fails and they continue to lose ground to Apple and Google, the wild west will be reopened at Microsoft. I would hope that Windows will make some bets on the future that are yet to unfold. It would be nice for a Windows OS to actually drive excitement in the industry again. Not just OEM’s getting excited about selling more laptops, but actual enhancements that change how we work and interact with technology. It would be nice to just have a vision for the future and not an upgrade.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann, December 19, 2011

The Cloud called SalesForce.Com

Published on December 9, 2011 by hansh51Leave a comment

One of the phenomena’s that came about during the DotCom era was Customer Relationship Management Software. To be clear it did not start during this period but it seemed to generate a lot of press during this period. It became significant as large enterprises needed to centralize how they managed their relationships with customers. On paper or in PowerPoint it made a lot of sense. Suddenly you had companies popping up providing customers with a solution. On paper and in PowerPoint. In reality it was actually not so bright and cheery. However one company seems to have emerged from the rubble fairly unscathed and intact, Salesforce.Com. It’s worth a look as beyond CRM I think we will increasingly see more of these Cloud players enter the market, in fact we already are.

I gotta admit CRM applications are painful. Does not matter who you are – the user, the administrators, the system integrators, etc…I have been around quite a few of them. Early in my career at Microsoft, a corporate decision was made to go with Siebel Systems Software as Microsoft was growing and had customer information in spreadsheets, databases and 3 rd party software all over the company. It was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and get good information out of those systems. After the decision was made it would take over 2 years before it successfully launched Siebel internally. The user experience was awful. Later when I was part of the account team for Microsoft covering AT&T Wireless, AT&T was implementing Siebel for their call center. Three system integrators later and millions of dollars spent it failed. It was an industry joke.

Why do these systems even exist? Well there is a huge demand for being able to manage customer relationships in a centralized way. Both for small and large business it is important to project sales, pipelines etc..as a measure of the overall health of an organization. When we talk of Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) we talk about the cost of running a business. With CRM we are measuring to see if our revenues will exceed our costs. CRM is the window into the pulse of the customer, or so it was hoped. Initially CRM was thought of within the confines of a companies IT infrastructure. In hindsight that may have been a limited outlook. The internet was exploding and it seemed apparent that CRM should reach beyond the confines of the corporate network infrastructure. CRM systems during this time period became synonymous with cost over runs.

This brings us to the promise of the cloud in helping us off load those costs. In the dotcom era a lot of companies came that had the right idea, they were just ahead of their time and the technology was not quite ready. A few, however, did survive. One from the era was Salesforce.Com. Unlike other companies I worked with in the Dot Com era SalesForce.Com has a better and more mature plan. An example of a company not so good at CRM in the cloud was a company called Corio. I met with their CTO, who was an entertaining ex-Oracle guy, who laid out the Corio plan. He said they were going to take Siebel, make it cookie cutter and resell to companies with no customization. Remember how I started this blog post? My eyes were rolling as soon as he said “cookie cutter Siebel”.

Getting back to Salesforce, they were much more pragmatic. First their application would live in the cloud. So all up-time and management of systems was on Salesforce. That already is saving an IT department money. Second they would allow customization, through a partner channel. This made a lot of sense, because every sales force is different and always has some unique requirement. To try to create cookie cutter solution is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. They created a developer platform to support this customization. These are all attractive solution offerings and reduce the burden to IT departments. ATT Wireless was a good example of an IT department with extreme costs and therefore extreme burdens. My last employer, Limelight Networks was an example of a company that was small and needed CRM, just not the headaches that went with it. Salesforce made a lot of sense.

My impressions of Salesforce as a user were fairly favorable. There were a lot of “how to” questions to the Salesforce guru at Limelight. I am not sure any company can have a CRM app without having to hire a person or team of people to act as your go to people for general Q & A. Even with a user interface as kind as Salesforce, there still is a lot happening and you could spend weeks trying to learn everything it does and how it interacts with other corporate information systems, or does not interact. Because companies evolve there is a need for the CRM app to evolve with the growth of a company.

Salesforce right now is maturing. Like many fast growing companies it is in its arrogant phase., This is based on feedback from people I know whom they have called upon. It’s typical. One because their CEO Marc Benioff is an ex-Oracle guy. Oracle guys all seem to be aggressive type-A personalities. Two during the early hip honeymoon phase all tech companies I have been around or worked at are cocky when things are going well, The list is long, Microsoft, SUN, Google, Apple, Yahoo, and every dotcom start-up I was around (something to do with over inflated stock prices). In hindsight, it’s a good place to be. It is a fun period professionally to know you are leading the pack. It will be interesting to see how SalesForce expands and goes to version 2 and 3 of the company. Or it could end up like PeopleSoft and Siebel, two companies founded by ex-Oracle guys only to be acquired by Oracle.

The cloud is very real and is set to become a dominant part of the technology landscape. Salesforce.com survived the dot bomb days and has emerged as a leader in the Cloud App delivery space. They are still in the enviable space that many sales opportunities are greenfield opportunities (meaning net new revenue) which Wall Street loves. Moving forward like any fast growing company they will have to prove they are more than a one trick pony. They will also need to be more humble. Given their executive leadership that may be a bit of a sticking point. The good news as I have said the cloud is here and Salesforce is well positioned to be a leader.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann December 9, 2011

Killing the Microsoft Tablet

Published on November 23, 2011July 27, 2012 by hansh51Leave a comment

Around the time Apple launched the tablet Microsoft was working on something called the Courier. A Microsoft alternative to the iPad. Microsoft beat writer Jay Green just did an expose on the Courier and what happened for CNet. It’s a pretty telling article on some of the inner working at Microsoft and how decisions are made. It makes for good corporate political intrigue . It raises a lot of questions. I shall try to provide my insight.

I remember the first photo’s of the Microsoft Courier, the new, but ill-fated Microsoft project to capture the tablet market. For starters it was different. It opened like a book with two screens. It looked very cool and sleek. It showed thinking outside of the box ( I hate that term). Being at Microsoft at the time it was something everyone craved. Microsoft has and still is in the mindset of let others create the market and we will come from behind and take the market. In the past against WordPerfect, Lotus, Novell and many others it was a strategy that worked well. Lately that has not worked so well starting with Search, Smartphones, Social Networking, Digital Music, Cloud Computing (Ballmer’s quote on the cloud -“We’re all in”…did you really have a choice?) etc..it has, in my view, become a rather outdated mode of attack. The market is moving much faster and the gains some of these companies make in market share, make it a lead that cannot be caught

In reading the article you get a sense of internal Microsoft politics and I have to be honest a rather disconnected Bill Gates. We will tackle the latter first and then move on to this blogs episode pf “Dallas” in the next segment. At one point as things unfolded Steve Ballmer turned to his old friend, boss and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates for his opinion and guidance on which direction to move forward with. J Allard and crew met Bill at his Kirkland office to review and promote the Courier, as the Tablet for Microsoft moving forward. Things were going well until the discussion of email came up. The Courier teams view of email was web-based services such as Hotmail and gMail. Bill still had and has stuck in his head Microsoft Outlook as the greatest email client since sliced bread. I think Bill has lost touch with how people communicate. We have services like SMS (text messaging), Instant Messaging, and Social Networking. There are a lot of options that do not require a desktop app of the power of Outlook. But Bill is not a hipster so the new communications technologies seem primitive to him. He is so connected to his inner geek. As Steve Jobs said, “It would not have hurt him to have dropped some acid when he was younger”. The Courier team did not gets Bill’s blessing. They should have brought some LSD.

Microsoft politics at a high level is pretty simple. The group with the most money wins. At Microsoft that really means two groups, the Microsoft Windows division and Microsoft Office division. What the Courier team was doing was a stripped down version of Windows that would have its own release cycles. I always felt one of J Allard’s great attributes at Microsoft was his ability to see what was wrong with success. When he launched XBOX he essentially formed a new company within Microsoft and did not fall into the Microsoft product group track. The challenge he was going to have with the Courier was it required an operating system. He was going to do battle with the Windows Division. It was to be a David versus Goliath moment. However in this story David does not win.

Steve Sinofsky is the President of the Windows Division, Though not always popular, he does do one thing very well, ship products on time. I can only guess at this time but I doubt my guesses will be that far off base. To talk slightly technical for a moment we have the issue of code bases. This is the actual code developers write to create Windows. The stuff that makes most people’s eyes glaze over. What J Allard was proposing was a “new” Windows OS for the Tablet. One with its own release cycles. Over time it would “fork” into a completely different direction and I could see eventually being its own OS with its own fiefdom at Microsoft. . These are very valid points as Microsoft release cycles are no longer acceptable in today’s technology world. In the old days three-year release cycles were the norm. In today’s consumer driven world the norm is 12 to 18 months. More importantly it would not be under the guise of Steve Sinofsky. Given that the Tablet space is one of the hottest markets on the planet and Microsoft was starting to work on the planning for Windows 8, this was a battle Steve was not going to lose. Steve simply could say, “J I have 10 billion dollars….game over”. And so it was.

Coming forward to today we look like we are still 12 months from the release of Windows 8 (maybe sooner depending on which rumor mill you are listening to). In the meantime the market has heated up. The iPad 2 is a run away success. It sold 500,000 in its first three days on the market. We now have low-cost providers entering the market for the holidays the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes and Noble Nook. These coming at prices below $200. The early review on the Amazon Kindle Fire are very good. In the mean time we wait for Microsoft. Will it be June?/ In time for the holidays in 2012. What version will Apple be on? By then they should be hard at work on the iPad 4. I big bet Microsoft is making is the belief that the market wants Windows, that they specifically want a Windows Tablet. The market moves fast, it will be different when the Windows 8 Tablet ships.

Finally the frustration for many Microsoft employees was that there was a cool device being worked on. It was perceived as something that could change the game and make Microsoft likable again. It was different and dangerous, something that is a must if you are to change a market. But do to internal politics we never saw the Microsoft Courier. It was created with a start-up mentality in some cool offices in Pioneer Square. As Jay Greene comments that has all been shut down. I am not surprised by the death of the Courier and it’s legacy It was a battle that it was never going to win. However I know that the people at Microsoft crave this type of excitement in product development. Though Windows brand still commands 90% market share, it is frankly becoming a rather dull brand. In the mean time we are promised better things for tomorrow. However a promise for tomorrow is a promise to no one.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann November 23, 2011