Eric Karjaluoto has an excellent post on what he would do, if he were given the task of re-branding Microsoft:
I’d ask the team at Microsoft to ask some blunt questions about who they really are. I don’t mean the bullshit “mission statement” responses here either; I’m talking brutal honesty. From a peripheral standpoint, my nutshell response to this situation would be something like, “We’re the most powerful computing force on the planet, and we’re acting like a bunch of sissies.”
I find two lines in the last paragraph very telling:
Of course, none of this is going to happen. Microsoft is still a behemoth, and it’s not as though they are asking for my opinion.
And here, of course, is an opportunity for Microsoft to prove Eric wrong. Let’s see if anyone inside Redmond sends him an e-mail. This for me goes back to what JP Rangaswami said a wee while ago:
People want Microsoft to change. That is the essence of what made the Blue Monster such a hit, it was a way of people outside Microsoft telling people in Microsoft of the intense need for change…
The more I get to know Microsoft, the truer this seems to be, both inside and outside the company.
[Thanks to Leah for the pointer.]
