Microsoft

When I bought my iPad it was very easy to download my new Kindle application to read all my books I bought on Amazon, and I’m sure that Jeff Bezos knows that my Kindle may be replaced. Bezos can do this because he’s not in the book reader business, he’s in the book seller and publisher business (along with many other products). Bezos is not cannabalizing his core. 

This week's op-ed piece (Microsoft's Creative Destruction) in the New York Times from Dick Brass, a former Microsoft VP, was a wake up call for the tech world. In a thoughtful but ultimately scathing piece, Brass describes how and why Microsoft gradually evolved from an innovative company with first-mover advantage to a technological also-ran scrambling behind just about everyone in bringing new products to market:

Home energy management is hot and I’ve seen more than a dozen companies having a very similar approach. It is almost hopeless for small start-ups to play the same, as many deep pockets have been working on this for a long time. Whirlpool and energy retailer Direct Energy have joined forces to showcase what the energy efficient home of the future will look like at the CES. I’ve seen some cool stuff from them.

Video games and movies are one of the more interesting neuromarketing applications, in that the technology can be applied to not just advertising but the product itself. A new effort by Microsoft and Emsense carries that idea one step further by attempting to compare viewer engagement with advertising across multiple technology platforms, including Xbox LIVE and traditional television spots.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

Microsoft continues to stumble along its doomed quest for cool with a series of Internet videos that make absolutely no sense. One spot (above) was so incomprehensibly bad that popular outcry got it yanked. 

by: Alain Thys

Microsoft just published a rather thorough report on the future developments of the internet across Europe. One of the bold predictions they are making is that it won't be long before Internet actually overtakes (traditional) television in terms of media consumption time.

by: danah boyd

Last week, I gave my first talk at Microsoft since joining MSR. This talk was part of the annual Tech Fest where researchers from labs around the world come and share their work to the broader Microsoft community. For the most part, it's like a large science fair. There are booths and demos and posters and swarms of people descending to ask questions of researchers. It was pretty trippy to be thrown into this mix after only being with the company for a month.

by: Idris Mootee

Microsoft last week announced it’s plan to start opening retail stores everywhere in the country, people immediately think of Apple stores. But what is Microsoft going to sell? Microsoft makes very little of it's own hardware unlike Sony. But even Sony’s retail strategy is questionable. The Sony stores are so boring. Remember those IBM stores that existed 10 years ago? Even the Nintendo store in NY City is nothing more than a showroom.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

For all I can tell, news of the latest off moment in Microsoft's on-and-off, sometimes contentious courtship of Yahoo! is good news, not bad. 

The kabuki drama that is merger reporting in the business media would be silly if it weren't so blindly evident of deja vu, all over again. Here are a couple of different ways to look at the story: