Microsoft Hates the iPod
This is an interesting article.
I guess Microsoft marketing tactics aren’t reserved for competitiors. Come on kids, you championed dogfooding and obviously, the dogfood you’re peddling doesn’t taste too good. Shouldn’t people buy the products they like and that work for them? Should their managers be able to coax them into spending personal money on something they don’t want? If A is better than B I buy A, it’s a market driven economy, that’s how it goes. If owning an iPod goes against what your group at MSFT produces then do what you’re supposed to do, fix your product. Go borrow from iPod+iTunes like you’ve borrowed in the past, it has worked well for you.
We’re I in the same position I think I’d give an iPod to everyone on my team, make them use it, find out why they love it and discover why no one is buying the Window Media/WMA counterparts. Then I would create myself an MBO to fix this with our own products and cascade it to my whole team. If in one year it wasn’t fixed I’d quit, obvisouly I didn’t get it.
Posted by troyboy at February 2, 2005 11:15 AM
Interesting article. I work for the empire. Perhaps I work in the wrong group, or I just don’t have enough friends here, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of our powers that be attempting to discourage iPods. Me thinks the article is taking comments from a teeny like-minded cross section of MS’s managers and broadly over simplifying for the sake of a potentially sassy article in order to elicit a reaction from its readers.
And no, I don’t drink the kool-aid here. Just saying it as I see it.