Adereth

minimalmac:

The post-PC era has started, and the iPad blazed the trail. Look at who is following Apple’s lead in this direction: Google, RIM, Motorola, Dell, and Samsung. HP — the biggest PC-maker in the world, at least by unit sales — wants in, and they want everyone to know it.

One startling omission from that list: Microsoft.

The usual spot on analysis and plenty of healthy guessing from The Chairman. But there is a reason I quoted the above from the piece as a whole.

It is amazing to me that Microsoft’s shareholders are not storming the doors and demanding Steve Balmer’s resignation. With only a couple of exceptions, every initiative launched under his tenure has been a failure. For them to have missed this computing shift is telling. But to not even have a dead horse in the race is unexplainable. 

But here is another angle to illustrate just how blind they have become to innovation and opportunity:

Microsoft is, and always has been, primarily a software company. You would think, especially with their bread and butter product Office, they would have at least focussed their efforts on getting a version of Office running on all of these new devices. Can you imagine how fast a well designed iPad version of the Office Suite that had easy document transport with the desktop (PC and Mac and maybe using “the cloud”) would sell? Especially in enterprise businesses?. Seriously, they would be generating millions of dollars a month with such a thing.

Why not hire a bunch of iOS developers, people who know how to design a nice app for the platform, to build it? Why not get your Online team, which is bleeding money, to instead focus on the back-end desktop sharing so people can easily get their Office docs to it? Why not return to your roots and do the very thing that made you successful – make software?

I’m asking these questions because I’m just flat out confused by it. Seems like a no brainer to me.