Microsoft the best company of failed products/brands

I been and to a point still am a somewhat big MS supported, but that is slowly changing with recent products/brands that MS made, released, screwed, renamed, and or allowed to fail because of **** poor innitiative and support.

Not even sure where to start.

Zune excellent idea, great build quality, good software, poor marketing, poor to non-existant global release, with no marketing, no global release ms simply let it die

The original Tablet PC, this failed fast and bad. maybe not fully MS fault, now they are trying again, will they succeed, probably not.

Kin Phone, this one deserved to die, MS should never even let this one see daylight.

MS WebTV, anoher failed atempt, Apple got their AppleTV, Google their GoogleTV, then there is Roku, WDTV and numerous other products.

Money, another failed product, could have still be around and succeed, other products from different companies are still around

Encarta, could have been so much better, if only it was updated more often, backed by build online database, more multimedia, could have been better then wikipedia, but no, MS starts something and ever stands by it

Passport, wallet, .net passport, microsoft passport network, live id, windows life as past or MSN, microsoft account...... seriously! make up your mind!! how many times are you going to rename the same service. this is another reason why MS brands always fail, when people learn about one MS brand like windows live, next year is renamed to something else.

MS search, MSN search, MSN, Live search, Bing, again pick a name and stick with it, why is google so sucessful? maybe because everyone know what is it? and it doesn't get renamed every few years.

Microsoft network products, for few years MS made routers and such, and again instead of making them better and release new products they did their thing and dropped the brand/line.

Expresions, another products that had good potential with some work and good marketing, lower price it could on some level rival some adobe products and maybe even create a niche market with unique products.

mappoint, another brand tha is failing and failling fast

windows mobile, this failed hard, and everyone knows it

windows phone, while some (especially here)will not excactly call this a failure yet. but market share point of new, its not doing all that great.

windows, now this brings us to thier biggest products, MS seems to be going though cycles, windows 95, windows ME, Vista and now 8. after each screw up, they recover a bit by releasing a much better products for its time like 98se, XP, 7. This cycle shouldn't happen.


So why is MS so bad at brands, products and sticking by their product?

1) Inconsistency, MS brands are all over the map, a lot of it has little to no association. then MS can't keep up their mind, brands keep changing, when consumers learn of one name, MS renames it to something else or drops it.

2) poor follow-though, a lot of thse products failed becuse MS released them and pretty much let them fail. no ads, no marketing, limited availability, often not even mentioned on main site, hidden somewhere hard to find

3) poor design, all MS software that failed or soon will (money, encarta, mappoint) once designed has not really change till the time it failed.



i'm sure i missed quite a few MS failures over the year

Not sure how this is relevant to operating systems except for one tiny line. And that good/bad OS cycle myth has been debunked numerous times.

And despite having many failed products, they are one of the most successful companies in the world. I wonder why, maybe because the successful products far outweighed the failed ones?

you forgot the most imp reason -

4) internal politics

MS has scrapped more amazing products that were shipping/close to being done due to management changes than most companies release.