Windows is now 30 years old. Today Microsoft has roughly 45,000 engineers to build Windows 8, skip 9 and now 10. It took me days to find an innovative feature — at least something tiny… just couldn’t find anything. In my opinion it is absolutely amazing to manage 45,000 software engineers without letting them do something innovative. I guess it takes a special breed of engineers who can actually do that. Go into an office day in and day out to work on a next version that changes a lot of things to keep users busy without creating absolute any added value.
OK — it has always been difficult within Microsoft to do something out of the ordinary. Everything was either purchased or copied from a competitor — but
in the last 10 years the company was left with no more competitor to copy
Poor Microsoft. I think it is unfair to complain about Windows, Office and the other byproducts such as the database and so forth without offering a competitor that actually shows them what to do — like in the good old days.
Please help Microsoft stay alive
The only way to help Microsoft keep going is to innovate for them and let them copy or acquire like in the past. There are hundreds of thousands of innovative startups ready to do that. So far they could not find VCs to support them because they all have still to many Microsoft shares. But I guess we will need to find a way to do that
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Operating SystemInvent a new operating system that is not an advanced disk operating system and device handler to manage a keyboard, mouse monitor, printers etc. but a smart OS the is architected as a data bus, a security system and smart api engine.
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Office SystemIt’s painful to watch people still buying a system that is now older than some of the newer mainframe applications and has nothing more than we had 20 years ago to type text, make spreadsheets and presentations. And email is not even able to create good looking news letters with modern marketing process integration. We still need business software — but no office software. How cool would it be to provide applications for people with today’s real needs such as communication, social interaction, marketing, sales, project and team collaboration and things that we really need?
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Tools and stuffI guess we can skip that — it has never been important anyway and the tools of value are available from other vendors.
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Development toolsI think we can agree that the days of Visual Basic and C** nearing its end. Even Java is not very helpful more modern tools like Node.js still have not the necessary powerful infrastructure, testing tools and IDEs that it should have.
Back to the question how to finance that? I feel we can pull together some twenty thousand angels from around the world with some $50,000 investment potential to aggregate a Billion $ for seed rounds.
I wonder: WHAT DO YOU MEAN: Should we put a cause together like ’Safe Microsoft’ to keep the company in business in the next 20 years by creating some innovative companies they can copy or buy again? Ok ok ok — there is an issue that the startups may not sell and it takes Microsoft too long to copy — like in the Internet era or the era of the Social Web but when the next technology push comes what then? I guess it is still worth trying.