I think this article is a little off-base. Having money and a less than dire need to survive does not automatically stifle innovation. Microsoft has an enormous amount of management overhead and process that grinds brilliant engineers and their output into a fine paste. They have cannibalistic internal competition for resources and teams are actively discouraged from sharing code and cooperating. You might argue that their war chest allows this insanity to continue, but it's not the root of the issue.
I believe you just inadvertently proved the author's point. The cash cow products allow the insanity to continue, which wastes the potential of the employees and resources. The "cognitive decline" that the author mentions is the rationalization that allows this wasteful process to continue.
Poor, short-sighted leadership is the root cause of cash cow disease, not the profit itself.
> Having money and a less than dire need to survive does not automatically stifle innovation
No, but it makes space for the kind of complacency that stifles it. Also, having a successful product that's your cash cow makes it hard for you to develop the next-generation product that will kill it, specially if it does so by generating lower revenue.
Having huge amounts of cash also help you to make very bad product decisions. In order to learn what it learned with Wave, did Google really have to create such a monstrous flop? Couldn't it be a private beta or an internal tool? Couldn't it be a private beta? As for the original Xbox, I am not sure the only reason for its existence was to hurt Sony. It's very nice to say "we intended it to fail" years after you release a second-generation product. Microsoft was into games before, with Sega (the Saturn ran a version of WinCE). Did Microsoft really have to release the Kin?
But I agree with you on one thing: Microsoft is the Grand Master of using vaporware and half-assed products to damage the competition. Why would anyone consider the date Courier was "shown" be days before what was suspected to be the date Apple would announce its tablet? I also disagree with the article when it considers Google's 20% time a waste. Neither them nor we know what is the Next Great Thing that will make search-driven ads obsolete. They, like us, have no idea. That's why they encourage creative people to shoot in all directions: because one will eventually hit something big.
And yes, as of December 2010, he is wrong about Android. It's a huge success and telcos, AFAIK, pay Google a fair amount to use it (although open-source, you pay for some apps like Gmail and contacts and to use the Android and Google trademarks). I am not sure whether he would sound better in August.
If Wave has any pressure to be a successful application, it would have been integrated with plain old SMTP e-mail, and would possibly be eating Gmail's lunch by now.
Word is they did. Apparently they had some contractual obligation to do so.
And I don't think they intend for XBox to fail, but the goal wasn't to make profit in of itself, but rather to block and clear the way for their own living room initiative.
Why would anyone consider the date Courier was "shown" be days before what was suspected to be the date Apple would announce its tablet?
Huh? Courier was first shown in 2009. Way before the iPad was announced. If anything MS cleard the field for the iPad by announcing they were killing the Courier project.
> Huh? Courier was first shown in 2009. Way before the iPad was announced.
It was shown days before an Apple event. Rumors at the time pointed to Apple releasing its tablet at that event. They didn't and watching the rushed CGI video of a concept that would never become a product being released right before a non-event was priceless.
I took a look at the time line and you appear to have improperly recollected. The Courier leak happened 9/22/2009. The Apple event was 9/9/2009. By the time the Courier leak occurred everyone was already speculating the Apple Tablet was coming out in February as Apple's September event had long passed with no mention of a tablet. See this Mashable story:
There was an Apple product announcement on October 20th 2009. That's when they announced the new LED-backlit Macbooks, the Magic Mouse and a new line of iMacs. By the time the Courier video was shown, there was a lot of speculation on what would Apple announce that October.
As for the September 9th event, it was disappointing. Lots of people expected a "one more thing" moment with what would become the iPad.
So, it was right after an Apple event and right before a couple product announcements from Apple.
