Microsoft’s Commercial Failures
Microsoft is a company that has had a great success in the market. Windows is a top-tier software used by people and companies around the world (Kim, Cho, Park et al., 2016). Its video game console is celebrated by analysts, gamers and the gaming industry (Murnane, 2018), and its entry into the cryptocurrecy market with Ethereum has been lauded (Timmerman & Thomas, 2017). However, for all of its success, Microsoft has had plenty of commercial failures as well. This paper will examine some of Microsoft’s product failures and discuss why they failed.
One of the biggest product flops to come from Microsoft was the Zune, which was put out into the marketplace in order to rival Apple’s iPod. In this case, Microsoft was behind the curve and Apple had already cornered the market with its deft combination of iPod with iTunes and, essentially, all other Apple products. With Zune and Zune HD, Microsoft offered nothing new and essentially came with none of the “cool” factor that Apple was oozing at the time with its novel, nifty and very neat new product line. In terms of innovation, Microsoft was simply piggy-backing on the backs of its betters, hoping to get a share of the market. It did not and Zune was quickly consigned to the digital dust heap of the tech industry...
While Windows has been a stable product for years and the success of Windows 98 was meant to usher in the new Windows Me, this commercial bomb was apt to be unstable and users complained it was full of bugs. Microsoft would pull the product after a year and would go on to offer consumers much better fare with Windows 2003, 2007 and so on. Windows Me simply failed to live up to expectations and was not programmed sufficiently well to meet the needs of its users. Those bugs were eventually fixed, but this was one rushed product that should have stayed in development.
Microsoft also tried to get into the smart phone market by making a hybrid product that was like a cross between a Blackberry, a flip phone and a smart phone. This quasi-smartphone, known as the Kin, was an expensive failure for Microsoft: it absorbed almost a billion dollars of investment and two years of development—and then it was only offered in the marketplace for a mere 2 months by Verizon (Smith, 2012). Its poor sales, poor interface, and poor appeal made it useless in an age of social media and hyper-cool products already being sold by Apple and other, hipper smart phone developers.
Windows Vista was another product that failed to wow users. Like Me, Vista…
