[unexpected]

I agree with you, but I fear that the internal politics with Microsoft have been absolutely stifling!

Let's take smartphones for instance - look at the Kin. From all reports, killed b/c of politics, in favor of Windows 7. Why not have both and see what the market decides?

The Courier. Killed - who knows why? Most likely politics.

Microsoft has so many innovative ideas that we see in Research - but we never see them in products! It always feels like the right hand is slapping the left hand. Competing fiefdoms are fighting over resources, over pub, and over power.

Microsoft needs to empower it's best leaders to make a product, from start to completion - much like Jobs does with Apple. At the end of the day, the buck stops with Jobs, and his vision goes. What happens at Microsoft? You have 100 PM's working on one project. You work diligently. Your design is "design by committee" but hey, it looks like it's going well.

Then some jealous VP of some other division has a beer with Ballmer expressing some concerns and the project gets killed. This needs to stop. There was no reason that the Kin/Courier should have been killed. If it flops, let it flop. If you don't take chances, you'll never grow.

Microsoft right now is afraid of its own shadow.

[warfangle]

I really, really wish they would have productized the Courier. I kept waiting with bated breath... and then, like usual, Microsoft ultimately finished quickly and with little fanfare.

[rospaya]

> Why not have both and see what the market decides?

Kin was killed after six weeks, the market decided it was crap and only a couple were sold. Actually not so much that the Kin itself is bad, but carriers weren't enthusiastic enough, and Microsoft had marketing problems for a product that would battle WP7 6 months later.

[unexpected]

you're right - it was killed after 6 weeks, but if you read the post-mortems/insider "scoops", it seems as if the Sidekick team wasn't allowed to make the product that they wanted to make. Features were getting pulled, changed, and strip-mined.

You illustrate another problem - I don't know why MS would view it as "battling" WP7 6 months later: 1) 6 months is a LIFETIME for a phone. The Pre went from amazing, potential company-saver phone to dud in less than that. 2) At the end of the day, all the money goes back to Microsoft. Why is that a battle? Internally it's a battle for mindshare - but MS needs to realize that they're both on the same team. Apple is happy cannibalizing its iPod sales for iPod Touches/iPhones.

3) If Microsoft wants to grow, several products are going to overlap. There seems to be a convergence towards "the one true device". A year from now, MS is going to start worrying if mobile phone sales are creeping into their netbook sales - they already worry that Office 365 sales are going to creep into Office licensing

[Locke1689]

Since I no longer work there I can say that the insider "scoop" was that main reason it was killed wasn't because Microsoft didn't allow the team to make the right product it was because the carriers interfered too much. The price point was completely wrong for the device that actually came out, but Verizon mandated the price regardless of what the actual target was. By the time everybody had gotten together no one knew what the target market or feature set was.