10 failures of Microsoft

Microsoft has had so many successes. Their Windows Operating Systems have cumulatively become an all-time blockbuster and something which we have simply taken for granted. MS Word-Excel-PPT entered our lexicon for good. IBM might have missed out on cloud early on, but Azure is making tremendous strides. A late entrant in gaming, Xbox 360 still managed to sell 85 million+ units.

But failures are the stepping stones to success. So, as expected, the Microsoft stable is still littered with many flops and not just a certain OS which may have severely underperformed in comparison to others. To their credit, Microsoft got into almost each and everything you could have thought of and expectedly did not make a splash in everything.

Here is a list of some of their failures…

1. Internet Explorer: It is amazing that something which was so successful and had a monopoly is now ending as a failure. But the writing was on the wall and IE had already become a hit with memesters as the ultimate slowcoach of all slowcoaches. When Netscape came in the mid-1990s, it had a monopoly. By the turn of the century IE dominated and stood steady in the early 2000s. Firefox challenged and Chrome took over in the 2010s. But now Microsoft has officially announced that IE 11 will get no support from November 30 this year.

2. Bing: Google Search is the ultimate monopoly and nobody has managed to come close. But if anyone had the muscle to take them on then it had to be Microsoft. However they could come nowhere near even becoming a challenger and Google and Internet Search are still synonymous. Globally Bing hovers in the single digits in percentage market share while Google easily makes it to the 90s. Interestingly Bing had captured one-third of the US search engine market share at one point of time.

3. Zune: In the late 1990s MP3 players came into the market, but in the 2001 it became all about the iPod. After that we had a flood of MP3 players. When Zune came in 2006, there was a possibility that Microsoft could become a digital media player but it met with little success and the experiment was officially called off in 2011.

4. Microsoft Band: Today smartwatches and wearable IoT devices are becoming the rage. The Apple Watch has sold more than 30 million devices and become comfortable part of the iPhone-Mac ecosystem. While Xiaomi wearables are doing well, even FitBit crossed $1 billion in sales. Microsoft Band was launched in 2014 and didn’t create any waves and they ended things in 2019.

5. Terraserver: The Microsoft-Compaq project Terraserver was launched in 1997. Google Earth was launched in 2001. Terraserver never really took off and this became another domain in which Google left Microsoft far behind. The first mover advantage did nothing to Microsoft in presenting Planet Earth via satellite imagery.

6. Microsoft Portrait: 2020 is the Year of Collaboration. Zoom was launched in 2011. Cisco took over WebEx in 2007. Skype came in 2003. Well in 2002 we had Microsoft Portrait which was a black & white low bandwidth video collaboration tool. That never took off. But this space is slightly different as the tech giant is still fighting it out with Microsoft Teams.

7. Groove Music: iTunes revolutionized the way we sold and consumed music. Groove Music, which lasted from 2014-18 became another Microsoft product which very few people heard of.

8. Cortana Smart Speaker: While Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices have captured the public imagination, the Harman Kardon and Microsoft Cortana smart speaker was also another product which faded away.

9. MSN Messenger: Once Yahoo Chat was the rage. Even chatting on Gmail caught on. Today it’s WhatsApp. That way MSN/Windows Live Messenger was an underperformer.

10. The mobile space: Windows Mobile., Microsoft Mobile. Microsoft Lumia Smartphone. Microsoft Kin. Surface RT Tablet. You can’t blame Microsoft for lack of trying. They have been experimenting in the mobile space non-stop with limited success. In fact the desktop Windows/Mac duality got translated into the mobile Android/iPhone duality.