Inspirational Technology

Has Microsoft lost its marketing touch

A few years ago it was a common saying among geeks that Microsoft had horrible products, but great marketing. However, yesterday I was reading this post on Tabula PC about the marketing of OneNote and it occurred to me that it isn't just OneNote that is seeing marketing problems.

.Net is probably the most visible example of the problem. They screwed up the marketing on that so bad that hardly anyone could tell you what .Net really was. To go along with it you had disasters like Hailstorm where the marketing was vastly removed from what people would actually accept as a product and the backlash was strong enough to actually kill it in the womb. Other recent struggles include Smart Displays, Pocket PC Phone edition, WIndows XP media center, their DVR product(marketed so poorly I can't even remember its name) and most of all Tablet PC. You might also throw the XBox in there as well, but that one's probably OK given it's Microsoft 1.0 status. This is really surprising given all the pre-launch hype associated with just about all these products. The Tablet PC in particular received a lot of hype, but since they actually launched the product it seems marketing just ran off the rails. This was very clear when I went out to buy my Tablet PC. The only place that had any clue about Tablet PCs at all was the Franklin Covey store and that was obviously because the Tablet PC is the only computer that they sell.

It seems Microsoft can still pre-announce products with the best of them, but when it comes to actual shipping products they've lost the ability to effectively sell the products. Considering that most of the products I mentioned are consumer products that's not too encouraging for a marketing king like Microsoft. In fact, of all the products I listed, the only one that I believe might ultimately be considered a success is the XBox and even there I'm not too sure.

I believe, Microsoft, in their rush to be perceived as "innovative" is just throwing products against the wall to see what sticks. If that's the case, then that's an even better sign that they've lost their marketing touch. Pre-launch hype is probably a lot cheaper to create. At that point everyone has no choice but to accept what they say. However, once the product is actually shipping it's a different story. It seems to me that even though Microsoft has hoards of money, they're afraid of actually committing to what's really necessary to make the products successful.