But it's not what Microsoft does. It would a\be a seismic shit to their way of doing business and I don't know if they would survive the transition. The whole Windows model is "be all things to all people all of the time", which leads to their widespread penetration but rarely being the best at any one thing.
If they have to shift to being more focused, I don't know if they'll keep enough of their customer base to live through the upheaval.
and a seismic shift, too :-)
> ... to their way of doing business and I don't know if they would survive the transition. The whole Windows model is "be all things to all people all of the time", which leads to their widespread penetration but rarely being the best at any one thing. If they have to shift to being more focused, I don't know if they'll keep enough of their customer base to live through the upheaval.
Those are good points.
But as Paladin2 pointed out above, Microsoft has done some fine hardware (Zune jokes aside), usually on the second or third iteration for any given product, but they do get it right eventually.
For the longest time, the symmetric (old-style, before it looked like a comma) Microsoft mouse was the world standard, even as Apple went from design to design, including the much-reviled "hockey puck". Microsoft produced some strange looking keyboards, but they were generally robust.
If there are rough waters ahead for Microsoft as it starts marketing more systems, they are there because Windows customers are used to having hundreds of options on all sorts of things. Apple gives you very limited choices, and that's been their business model, so their customers expect that. Microsoft will be fighting decades of having too much choice.
Who knows, maybe Windows buyers will actually enjoy a more limited choice menu.
I'm not a big Rah-Rah Microsoft fanboi, but I would love to see them succeed at a system-level product line. Surface has that potential, but they've gotta make it move farther into the marketplace, soon.