The arrogance of Microsoft
/Scobleizer
An excellent piece by Robert Scoble on why Microsoft and its CEO. Steve Ballmer still don't get social networking.
An excellent piece by Robert Scoble on why Microsoft and its CEO. Steve Ballmer still don't get social networking.
Don’t miss this quote. It’s demonstrates everything that is wrong with Microsoft’s approach:
“There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure,” Ballmer said.
When I worked at Microsoft I heard this over and over and over again from various engineers and program managers who STILL haven’t competed effectively with WordPress, Flickr, Skype, YouTube, or any of the other things over the years I’ve heard this “we can build that in a few weeks” kind of arrogant attitude attached to.
But, remember eBay? Remember how dozens of competitors tried to get into the eBay space? (and still are?)
Why aren’t they succeeding? Because eBay is NOT about the technology. It’s about the community and unless you have something that’ll convince the buyers and sellers all to switch all at one moment you’ll never be able to take eBay’s market away. Translation: it’s too late and eBay has huge defensibility around its business because people won’t move away from it even if you demonstrate 5x better technology.
