Sources used in this document:

Areas specifically of the most struggles for Microsoft are in product development and release schedules aligning with expectations of customers, product quality at release, and the continual need to become easier to do business with. Microsoft continues to struggle on these three points, perhaps because they are the last bastions of control internally that may not be entirely aligned with customers yet. In terms of improving Microsoft, resources need to be aligned to beat committed launch dates; this is an area where the company fails most often. Second, quality assurance needs much more work for initial releases of operating systems. It is common knowledge that it's best to wait for the first service pack to be release for an operating system before installing it. Finally the licensing and pricing practices of the company are still very difficult for enterprise customers to work with. This final area needs the most work by far, as competitors find this an area where they can quickly surpass Microsoft in sales cycles and win enterprise-wide accounts over quickly. Microsoft is still in the midst of transforming itself from a technology-centered and myopic company to one centered on markets. Initial successes in the last several years have saved the most profitable business they have, which are Microsoft Office applications. Yet with the advent of Linux and open source operating systems, Microsoft's challenges regarding its own myopia are more acute than ever.

Microsoft nearly misses the Internet due to Myopia

Microsoft's near-miss of the burgeoning growth opportunities of the Internet can be directly attributed to their highly myopic view of themselves as a provider of technically advanced yet shrink-wrapped software instead of being a provider of solutions. This viewpoint pervaded the company through the early and mid-90s and nearly cost the company its most prized customer possession, which is the PC users' Desktop, which would have been lost if Microsoft had lost the browser wars against Netscape and dozens of smaller competitors. The intent of this paper is to define how the Microsoft culture had become so myopically focused on their own technologies and the processes used to create them, the reversal that happened after their dominance of the PC Desktop came under serious risk, and the concepts Microsoft use today that support Dr. Levitts' findings and analysis in Marketing Myopia, 1975. In fact Microsoft's ephinany regarding their myopic view of themselves is perfectly defined in Dr. Levitt's classic