Hello Redmond, for the second time (my Windows XP crashed while writing the first one). Let me tell you a story about a giant, its name was IBM, remember, when it moved the markets shook, but then he made very bad moves and today its just an ordinary company, after having to sell most of its amazing assets. Now you are the giant, and in the last 3 years you are making awfully bad moves, until now we, the users paid for it, but sooner or later you will also.

Hello Redmond, for the second time (my Windows XP crashed while writing the first one). Let me tell you a story about a giant, its name was IBM, remember, when it moved the markets shook, but then he made very bad moves and today its just an ordinary company, after having to sell most of its amazing assets. Now you are the giant, and in the last 3 years you are making awfully bad moves, until now we, the users paid for it, but sooner or later you will also.

Not only you missed the Internet completely, you were late everywhere. Your Xbox is not a competition to anything, in the music market you do not exist, and worst of all, all the products you released in the past years were awfully bad:

Lets start with this shameful stuff you call and operating system, the Vista, why the hell did you have to do this to your own users. If we are talking about operating systems lets talk about the windows CE 2005 that was far to heavy to the Pocket PCs it was installed on and caused many users to stay with their old 2003 device and the market that was supposed to develop is simply dying. The Outlook, which so many mobile users depended on, have some deadly bugs that even its developers cannot tell how to fix them. Window Media 11, a total fiasco, worse then any previous version, oh, and I almost forgot the MSIE 7.0, god forbid, never seen anything worst then this one, you simply pushed people to use the Firefox, thanks for the security but if it prevents me of working the way I want I pass. The Office pack is still crashing and no wonder more and more users find it very smart to move to the Open Office (and yes free is still cheaper then what you charge for yours).And I havn't said anything about the .NET yet (this is a matter for a different letter)but I think you got the point here…

Actually my friends you got stuck in the late 80's beginning of the 90's and simply didn't notice the wind is blowing and where. Let me try to help you out.

 

  1. Remove that rubbish you call the Vista from the market, and apologize nicely to all the suckers that bought it. Remember the ME ? How fast does it take to remove garbage.

  2. Start fixing your product and your image. All your products require updates and debugging fix then, instead of releasing new rubbish fix the old one.

  3. Remove this Genuine tool and the ridiculous registration process, it not only unfair it also looks greedy and not professional.

  4. You have 99% of the markets (at least out of 300,000 users that visited my site in the last 2 months). So this market is yours, move on to the world where you missed everything.

  5. Stop investing energy on the flat touch screen devices, you tried it more then 3 times and failed to push it into the market. Instead save the Pocket PC market by releasing a new operating system. Make it compact, make it fast, make it better then the 2003 because better then 2005 its too easy. And… make it upgradable for older devices.

  6. Build up a Quality Assurance team, because what you have now is a bunch of lousy yes-men and they are there just to say “its good, its fine, its the best” while its rubbish and you know it.

  7. Take the rest of your development team and build a search engine, not an interface, a real search engine that works better, you can do it, the Google can't, they are stuck with what they have. And guys, again, i don't need a fancy graphics i need results, reliable, fast and accurate and I don't want to be depended on those that know how to submit sites to a search engine, I want you to have a smart crawler.

  8. When you will have the search engine you can handle the rest easily, and remember if Google is capable of making money out of free services you can also.

  9. If you want the .NET to be a significant development environment for the long term. Work on it, it requires plenty of work, because it may be easy to develop with but it requires double and triple amount of time in debugging and making it compatible with other browsers.

The bottom line is improve the stuff you have, we, the users, deserve it. Start seriously working on the web, stop releasing rubbish that nobody needs, start working in the arenas you failed. Music – the apple Ipod is nothing but an expensive and fragile music player. Games – the Xbox is not competitive ? Invest time and money and make it competitive, don't release anything just because you want to be there.

I have been here before Microsoft, I have seen the giant goes (I have also seen him failing to market a great operating system). If you want to stay a giant, don't make the same mistakes.

ah.., and, yes, replace the CEO and fast anyone that made so many strategic mistakes in such a short time need to get the boot especially if his mentality is stuck in the 80s-90s.