Why Microsoft Has Willingly Given Up On Trying To Innovate 

Windows Phone was an incredible OS that was buttery smooth and new looking that needed very low specs to run smoothly. What killed it was the lack of apps because it launched late and people were already divided between android and iOS.

I had a Windows phone and actually thought it had a very well designed UI, it worked great, was snappy and intuitive. I also had a Zune, which was technically far superior to the iPods available at the time of launch. In both cases they seemed to lose because of bad marketing and bad business strategy rather than because of a lack of innovation or bad product design.

I'm afraid I disagree. Microsoft has created Azure and reworked Skype to become Teams. By doing this, they locked in tens of thousands of business customers.

You are missing the big picture here. Even though microsoft is very quiet at the consumer side (can change after Ai stuff because chat got) but their growth in the corporate department is astounding. It's like asking where is Oracle now or where is IBM now. They are not active at the consumer side but in the corporate and office department they have a single handed monopoly. Not every big company has to be a household name, there will be some winning in the shadows

At this point, they’re just settling on name brand recognition!! Everyone using word, excel, outlook, etc. No need to do anything else when you’ve got those!!

Google seems to do acquisitions to acquire teams and competition when they're still small, Microsoft does really big acquisitions and seemingly let's these companies continue doing what works

You forgot Azure. It’s their version of AWS and it actually has good portion of the market share. It’s no innovation sure, but they have a good source of revenue there

They ARE innovating. Office, Xbox, Microsoft Azure, and Windows have all been receiving updates that keep them essential. Office is still the best suite of Office applications.

I can't completely say that Microsoft has stopped innovating . They are experimenting with Bing , laptop and other stuff . But i must admit but none of the inventions have been groundbreaking or mass consumed like word or windows . I think Microsoft is trying to preserve that all windows feel and trying to improve the user experience perspective. Although i think windows 10 > windows 11 . May be that is my personal opinion.

I think you missed one major innovation from Microsoft: Active Directory. While its origins where in the late 90's, it really didn't fully develop until the mid 00's. While most people probably haven't heard of it, if you work for a midsized or larger organisation, chances are, when you logon to your work computer, it's via Active Directory. AD is a good product. It solved the problem of having multiple username/password combinations at work. The problem came when Microsoft started cranking up their prices around 2015. By then (pretty much) every piece of enterprise software was heavily integrated into AD. I worked in the IT department of a midsized not-for-profit enterprise at the time. We looked at alternatives, like public domain LDAP solutions, but it was going to be too costly and disruptive to change. We had little choice, but to pay Microsoft what they asked.

Microsoft is a B2B oriented company, and corporations don't want innovation they want things to work. They sell to customers, but they real customers is corporations. If you look for Microsoft revenues Office is the biggest cash cow, Azure is right behind, Windows (Mostly OEM licenses) come in third almost tied with Server products and licenses.

They understood that instead of creating a product to compete with other products there are making their services available on already popular platforms. Its actually genius. They used chromium in edge browser with bing and ChatGPT integration and making it better than chrome. Xbox is now expanding to PC, mobile and handhelds. Now they are integrating chatgpt to all their development products, office and cloud which aill make it a monopoly over other products

I loved my Windows phone. Way better than my iPhone. I was so disappointed it didn’t take off. Didn’t have a strategy to get developers to make enough apps.

Buying the companies to remain on top in a correct way does and will work

Windows Phone was one of the best-optimised mobile phones on the market during its time. When Android needed a minimum of 1GB of RAM to do basic tasks without hanging, windows worked at 512MB of RAM butter smooth without any problems and the transition animations were fantastic. it was one of the best phones to use. By no means was it a wrong product or a bad experience. You may be right on paper that Microsoft didn't design an OS from the ground up for smartphones and that's why they failed. But that's not true, they failed because Microsoft didn't realise they had to have apps on the phone to be able to do smartphone things. They failed to understand the market and its mostly bad marketing and market analysis. Judging by your statements, you probably might not have used a Windows phone and I don't blame you for that.

The problem is that all "innovative" companies rose to the top at their start because some innovative person started the company, then it trudged along on that initial success. When a stodgy old company buys an innovative profitable company, the stodgy management then stifles the innovation of the company they bought by "bean counting" and enforcing "diversity initiatives" and other things that kill innovation.

4:28 Internet Explorer was "innovative" because it was "free" when Netscape was charging money to use their software. This did eventually push the browser wars to freeware territory as charging for money means an automatic loss.

The few services that Apple has they bought. Their television streaming service may be an exception. But literally every reason to invest in Apple back in the nineties was because of acquisitions that are those apps which are the reasons artists, musicians and writers are loyal to the brand. They continued this with the iPhone services. Those acquisitions may have been cheap in comparison to what Microsoft is known for. It is hard to innovate when the guy down the street has a better product you can buy and implement into your company.

Windows phone was an objectively superior smartphone OS. But the app market was dominated by Android and iOS. They did not put enough effort to bring app developers into the platform.

And that's why I support Microsoft's acquisition of AB, a company that treats its subsidiary like a good father, doesn't interfere much but still quietly helps. And the worst thing about this story is that the Japanese monopolists and good at lawsuits say this acquisition is threatening the diversity of gamers' platforms.😂😂😂

Have you seen the tools they have built around chat gpt in Azure AI? Seriously innovative and not all made by open ai.

I ran a repair shop for 6 years from 2011-2017. Windows phones users LOVED their phones. They were so upset when they realized no more would be made. They should have kept making them and continually made them better. It would be competitive. I liked mine I had for a short amount of time til I tried iPhone and realized it was great for business.

I would argue that the way that they integrated GPT-4 and bing is pretty innovative. Although i do understand that it already existed.

I actually loved the windows phone when I had it it was super fast even on a budget version and the homescreen setup with the little windows every it was great I wish they never killed it but they were too late to the party so developers were never really interested in coding for the platform when they already have to for Android and Apple

They literally shook Google's core by coming up with BingAI. But this guy:

I’m glad that Microsoft has made all these acquisitions because Windows is finally nice to use again 😂

They built Azure, a huge profit driver.

They are starting to become more like VC’s than a tech development company

“He started small with Mojang… these are the guys behind Microsoft”. Lol :)

I think 💭 by the time anyone thinks of innovation Microsoft be there by not doing anything new in the sector. You see Microsoft have made such a strong start which became a pedestal but the statue felt like a Mt.Everest, if you think space race you know as a race tech innovation is the longest marathon and fastest in history. Great video 👍 By the way, I remember you using the bill’s piracy comment on your piracy video which was a year ago 😅 great journey hari 👍

Great video the transitions between chapters are implemented well. Waiting for next video

Yes, it is interesting. One almost wouldn't be aware of these things unless as the video notes: it has been told to us, in which sense I kind of really do appreciate this RU-vid channel because with each video there is so much to learn about the world that we live in that it is almost unparalleled in quality and sort of quantity because it does cover quite a range of topics at least in terms of themes so... Good. I like it. Now what I've noticed while watching the video is a thing that stood out to me, and I don't know if this is a normal nature cycle but when you mentioned about Microsoft acquiring a lot of companies and not interfering with their practices, and therefore that it was or had become more of a holding company than a business before and an enterprise later, I literally had to think about how companies and in this sense not just Microsoft but companies at large I would say and this is also combined with the people, so the consumers as well sort of pay more attention or at least put much more effort into companies themselves than say the world that we live in which by I mean foremost nature and the Earth. I had to think about that there and then which also prompted me to wonder a bit about the future of the Earth and how perhaps if we collectively made an effort to save or to preserve it together or to come up with some certain solutions to problems we all are facing, amongst which natural catastrophes but not just confined to that types of troubles (think of many earthquakes that happen for instance all across the world where when and if an area is hit, well you kind of can discern what happens i.e. a "catastrophe", hence the word and the thoughts) we actually, at least I have the feeling might do and achieve a lot in this regard, for and of the health of people and the environment we live in. Now. I am not particularly an environmentalist I have to sort of disclose but in this sense something about that idea of Microsoft being or becoming a holdings company in which sense it takes care of the various businesses it has acquired over the years to then preserve them, resonated to me in a greater sense. I think your videos have this tendency to do this to me more frequently than just here and is also one of the reasons why I love listening and watching videos on this channel. Peace.

Another great video,

Your channel is good and entertaining. Keep making videos. Thank you. : )

I will disagree on one thing though…. The Windows Phone OS (based on the Zune HD) was and STILL IS HEAD AND SHOULDERS THE BEST SMARTPHONE OS EVER. It was a genuine delight to use the phone,

Good job video editor. Impressive

I loved this style. Great video!

Loved this video ❤️, Thank you for sharing 🙌🏼 , So much to learn ✅

2 in 1 device category like surface pro, Hololens in Mixed reality category, Generative AI in Search, Enterprise class products like SharePoint, Office, D365 all from Microsoft.

I met Hernando of New Products at Microsoft in 2005. I tried to talk to him about some new products and he was simply talking of the "Singularity". I concluded that they were going to a "rent model". That is like they do with office trying to stop sales to start getting annual fees etc or monthly fees etc.

Nice to see the Lisbon office @15:16

Windows phone was out long before iOS or Android phones. Both Google & Apple pay royalties to Microsoft for the phones that they sell. Microsoft was concentrating the Windows phone on business users & ignored the consumer side that Apple & Google were going after. They should have marketed the Windows phone to home users before Windows phone 7. I remember a trainer I had in the early 2000s telling his class about the wonders of the Windows phone long before they finally launched Windows Phone 7 which was late to the game. Also, the Zune launched with more features than the iPod at the time. It had wireless sync for several years before Apple finally added it to the iPod. The Zune had a widescreen display when watching videos while the iPod still had a non-widescreen display. I will admit that Microsoft made several mistakes with Windows Phone. With Windows Phone 7, they reset the store for the Windows Phone which they did again for the Windows Phone 8. That along with being late to marketing the Windows Phone to home users I think were the biggest downfalls of the Windows Phone. They did realize with Windows 10 mobile to not reset the store again, but the damage from the past had already been done making it so that they were severely lacking on the apps. So Windows 95 changing the UI of the OS was not an innovation? Why do you ignore adding "Device Manager" to Windows? That made IT's job of dealing with hardware much easier. While I'm at it adding Active Directory in Windows 2000 was innovative making the network administrator's job much easier. You ignored Microsoft's purchase of Vermeer Technologies so that they could get what became Microsoft FrontPage. Which was widely used to make websites for more than a decade after Microsoft released the last version of the FrontPage server extensions being for FrontPage 2002 which would work with FrontPage 2003 just that the 2002 extensions had the last update or features added to them. FrontPage 2003 was the last version Of Microsoft FrontPage for Microsoft Office & at that point was only available as a stand-alone product while with Office XP it was included in at least one bundle (I'm going from memory on this one as I did support it at that time for Microsoft).

Very interesting background music!

Great video. Insightful.

Damn, that's interesting. PS: please dial down the animations a bit. They are a bit jarring, especially the test zooming in and out one.

I truly love this channel with all my heart!

Aren't arm based windows distro and ms products for Android phones thanks to understanding the arm. Architecture?

What about MS Azure and their defense contract, and their investment into ChatGPT and what about MS Bing rising in popularity?

The model nowadays is to set a monthly payment subscription, that is what companies follow now.

I had a Moto Q back in the day and I loved that thing.

I had a Zune 80 and love it. They had bigger and nice screens than the classic iPods. They even had some nice minis. The desktop software was much nicer to use than iTunes and wireless syncing was beautiful. They probably could have had a chance if the iPod Touch hadn’t came in and then they released the Zune HD with no real app store. Until smartphones came of course, which they also failed at despite having a pretty good product that was Windows Phone.

I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say Microsoft stopped innovating, just take a look on the Software Development side / Microsoft Visual Studio / Code and you'll see a lot of innovations. Also Microsoft is currently working on Windows OS that will be powered by AI.

Azure and Xbox are 2 pretty big things outside of windows and office that have come about in the timespan you mentioned...

Love your videos. But the recent background music in your videos is too loud and distracting.

Uh... Visual Studio? Azure? A whole bunch of excellent programming languages, extremely successful frameworks, runtime and compilers. Oh yeah, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Power B.I., and who could forget, DirectX 12...

I truly like the new microsoft better. Nice compilation. Embracing open-source is by far the most appealing of microsoft feats.

I know they weren’t first to the punch but they dominate the voice chat space now with Teams. Most companies use it.

I actually had a modded Zune back in the day with several movies and hundreds of songs.

Brilliant vid, thanks for the info

Cant wait to watch

The video editing is a little over the top. But I like it 👍

Microsoft's "revolutionary products" in the past 20 years are reworks of other products that are already popular but sometimes they make it better. For example, AWS => Azure, Chromebook => Surface, Google products => Office on Web. Even Teams video capabilities were because of Zoom. This sometimes works in the Enterprise market because businesses are used to Microsoft. But on the consumer market it usually fails because consumers are less likely to change. For example, Bing and Windows Phones failed because users didn't want to change.

Teams is a staple in the business world. Same with Windows, as well as for consumers who just want something that's familiar and works. Office is still defacto the office suit that everyone is trying to emulate. And their cloud business has some HUGE players running their services on them. They're set pretty much.

Microsoft Azure? Teams?

Microsoft is still my favourite phone I ever used. I wish they kept working on it.

Why would you’ve quite conveniently forgotten about VScode, WSL and WSL2 and co-pilot? What are your terms to define ‘innovation’?

It might be unpopular, but I personally rlly love Microsoft. Sure they do sketchy things at times, but overall I’ve always been treated great as a customer and the way they grew Minecraft so much makes me so happy.

Its India's culture to maintain a good Public Relation (PR) with nearby peoples & that's y Satya collaborated with most of Microsoft's competitors

Learning from Hauri while eating breakfast. Great way to start the day!

Well, it started with Microsoft BASIC, and then they bought Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) that they renamed to MicroSoft Operating System (MS-DOS). It was meant to provide most of the functionality of CP/M, that was popular with businesses at the time.

I'm a fan of Microsoft's direction in the past 10 years. Humility is exactly right. They've accepted they can't do things better than competitors so why not just integrate them? WSL2 is a clear example of this. Microsoft before Satya would never have pulled a move like this. WSL1 was terrible but well they knew that and within 2 years pushed out WSL2 and now WSA (android). You can now do anything besides iOS and mac apps on windows. 2FA on windows for convenience? Not saying that's recommended but you can do it no problem now. I personally like the change. Also that fact that they don't lock down windows. If you don't like something about windows, you can remove it, disable it, and replace it with something else. While they do continuously make this harder and harder they don't outright remove the ability to do so for individuals that want to. Contrast this to apple and increasingly google. Remember "don't be evil"? Whether or not this approach makes microsoft much money is a different question. I think I've directly given microsoft maybe a total of $40 over the past 10 years. Compare that to apple and google and that number is well over 20x if not 50x at this point. Guess Microsoft gets a lot more money from me indirectly though enterprise bulk licensing of products than anything else. I've switched over to a lot of self-hosted stuff so costs to hardware companies have risen dramatically but I honestly prefer that vs "paying to rent" software from tech companies.

13:45, is that a CEO, or Brennan from collegehumor?

When MS integrates GPT-4 with their hundreds of other companies, that is going to be something. Imagine a GPT-4 programmer adding new features to Minecraft.

Microsoft doesn't have to innovate, and they've de-emphasized software licensing for some time. Azure, Office365 and other subscription models has been their focus for some time with business clients having a priority. Meanwhile, their support of cloud based infrastructure and software defined networking along with being more OS agnostic has positioned them to be relevant for some time. The days of primarily depending on desktop Windows and Office licenses for a primary source of revenue have been gone for nearly two decades. Microsoft doesn't have to sell you a phone every year to meet their revenue targets. They bill you every month and put it in the bank.

wow i remember zune but back then i was a teenager with no money

Microsoft's Azure cloud platform is actually very innovative

would like to see some kind of showdown Xbox vs. Playstation

Did not expect to see Brennan Lee Mulligan in this video, yet here we are

Microsoft is so cool and great video man :]

When PWA (Progressive Web Apps) become mainstream… I hope these different companies make their own smartphones again! Also make Windows compatible with ARM processors!

But but but... The Zune came in BROWN!!!!! (I actually kinda liked that part, I say while staring at my entirely brown suite of luggage, current pants, glasses, furniture, and home accents 😁)

Tesla has "Electric Self Driving Cars" LOL

You forgot about Azure (MS Cloud), MS Teams, & Surface laptops/tablets

There is a lot of innovation happening in the developer space. .NET etc. Compared to the alternatives anyhow.

I own shares and firm believer of the company strategy

Biggest issue with Microsoft is making an SDK or technology and year or few years later they discontinue or make an new version which in incompatible with the older projects. Windows Phone 7 apps couldn't run on 8 without rewriting half the app, same with 8 to 10. They crippled some features or withheld APIs to developers so they had to workaround limitations. I loved Windows Phone, used 7,8 and 10 till the day it died. It was well designed and it worked fine, just some apps were a bit clunky because of the issue as said before

One minor correction ... Microsoft has NOT acquired ATVI yet. I know this because I've had ATVI stock for the last 2+ years and it is in complete limbo because the deal hasn't gone through. Everyone keeps trying to stop the deal and they wait until the 11th hour to cause max delay. It is not a sure thing.

Damn Bill is in hot water for other reasons too!!! Man, he is having a bad few years!!!

That music was to intense man

I was the only one in middle school with a zune and I can say that it was pretty good compared to the iPod.

Dang i miss my Windows phone. Not even from a nostalgia point. It was just such a great phone that gave me the feedom to customize my app sizes, use youtube even when closed, sleek design, music. Such a shame

I feel like you've missed out on the data analytics platform from Microsoft, which is quickly becoming an industry standard

They continually doing catch up on windows by altering the desktop or patching it with some other feature if you look deep into the os a lot of it is still windows 7 they need to work on a complete rewrite and that would how to innovate something new

Watching this on my Microsoft Surface Duo 2. Might not have been a massive sales succes. But it is definitely a innovative, unique product. Best pocket 'pc' I've ever owned, and it makes phone calls too 😜 So it's not like they aren't trying anything to innovate, they definitely are trying.

Seems like they innovate more than most companies to me

Yeah Satya Nadella is a smart CEO!

They do commercial backend mostly, and consumers are just a side job for them from what I learned a while back.

I am just gunna throw this out here but sometimes I don't need a company to "inovate" software like Windows is a perfect example of that. Windows is at its best when its not something I notice and just lets me do what I want to do on it. It is in part the reason why I never end up going to Linux for my primary workstation rig. I will also just say that Microsoft has been trying to innovate, but the changes they are making just don't take off.

Nice video but i think its a little too shaky.

Every computer I have had is windows The interchangeability Customization and familiarity (I started on a gateway windows 95.. playing flight sims) I don’t plan on changing what I do my gaming and even business with