We all remember Bob(TM) don't we?
Yes, I remember when they canned Bob 2.0 the weekend before it was to be shipped to the retailers in a big rollout. Apparently hundreds of thousands of copies were shinkwrapped and on pallets at the manufacturing facility when the plug was pulled---after whipping the developers really hard for 9 months in a deathmarch to get it out--all those pallets ended up in a landfill in Washington (according to one of the ex-BOB developers I worked with.)
Talk about demoralizing: Give up your life (and unless you've worked there you have no idea how much of your life you give up-- the Microsoft campus is just like a Branch Dividian compound must be.) and then at the last minute, oh, we made a mistake, product's cancelled.
But at least they did TRY to innovate with BOB. It was based on university research, not Microsoft research, of course, so it was a rip off to some extent, but they did TRY.
Other than that, though, what has Microsoft ever innovated? A year ago, the battle cry of the Microsoft apologists was "They have to be free to innovate!" but a year after I asked in this forum "innovate what" Not a single significant innovation (Besides new types of extort...uh. "marketing") has come to light.
Yeah, Robert, Microsoft is a successful product company, uh-huh. |
