Apple has a product-driven leader at the very top. Microsoft has a marketing-driven leader at the very top. That's definitely part of it.
Micro-startups inside MS would be a killer idea. Small teams of 2-5 people, isolated, given time and necessary resources to create idea's. The challenge would be to keep entrepreneurial types tethered to MS, rather than watching them leave to start a company on their own (be their own boss, reap more financial rewards, etc...).
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It looks, from the outside at least, that MS has been dealing with plenty of political turmoil for quite some time now. If you exclude legacy products (Windows/Office), you see a pretty bad track record in terms of financial success over the last 10 years. Zune, Kin, Tablet PC's, Windows Mobile (profitable, but who wants one now?), Xbox (successful as a product, how about paying off its multi-billion dollar investment?), MSN, Pocket PC's, etc...
Most of the tech Apple is creating today, Microsoft had years ago. The thing is, MS didn't refine it well enough. They need to spit and polish the crap out of their products. Not release a product, saturate the market with it, declare victory, and ignore nurturing it.
What are they doing most wrong? Lately they've been in reaction mode. They don't innovate. They copy. And by the time they get their copy out it's too late. They've always copied, but their copies use to be good. Or at least tethered to a commonly-used proprietary OS or file format with high switching costs.
Lately their mantra has been along the lines of this:
1) See an idea that's successful.
2) Decide to compete with it.
3) Form a team to build it. Possibly acquire companies to do so.
4) Build it internally behind closed doors.
5) 1-3 years pass. Competitors gobble up market share. Microsoft spends lots of cash.
6) Launch it! Expect consumers to replace their other gizmo with MS's gizmo, costing them money, and time with switching costs (how do you migrate an iTunes database with 10,000 ACC's, ratings, album artwork, et all, to Windows Media Player in a few minutes?).
And people must like it, right? We spent all this money building it, our focus groups said it was awesome, and it does what our competitors product does too!
They're missing a much-needed feedback loop. Alpha users, and beta users. They don't know if their masterpiece is any good until millions have been spent and they show it off. It's hit or miss.
> They're missing a much-needed feedback loop. Alpha users, and beta users.
That's true, but they've learned. Windows 7 is a massive success and Office 2010 is a great product. Both had extensive testing and user feedback.
Windows Phone is getting a lot of traction before it's release as well. Developer tools, getting devices into the hands of developers, releasing information very early long before it's release and getting it out there.
MS in the past few years has started to ramp up it's outreach to developers and the community, and it seems like they are working that way with their consumer oriented products.
And let's not forget that they have gone into markets not #1 and taken the spot. Linux was supposedly going to be the Netbook OS, but then in practically one year, MS took over that market.
It's not like Apple doesn't ever release underperforming products (see Apple TV for a recent example).
MS is struggling, but struggling from a good position.
According to Wikipedia, Apple has 34k employees. Microsoft has over 100k. Maybe at that scale, 34k and 100k aren't very different, or maybe that's like night and day.
Yes, and how many work in their retail stores (not sure if that's included). Every Apple store I've been to seems to have a 1:1 customer to employee ratio.
They should slash the product line. They won't because of the lock-in loops. If they cease to offer one product line, the lock-in loop where it participates gets broken.
So what's different from google? Top down control vs bottom up innovation. Google engineers have 20% free time to work on interesting projects. Something like that would do wonders for MS. Google didn't invent the 20% free time, 3M has let technical types devote 15% of their to their own projects for decades.
Isn't there a way to run a big company? Is anything known on how Apple does it? How big are their development teams, even?
Would it make sense to manage internal teams a bit like startups, that is they would have to succeed on their own and pitch for investments?