Posted by Andrew Edwards on December 22nd, 2010 at 3:42 pm

Recently the new Colossus that appears to stride all on line media--Mr. Zuckerberg of Facebook--claimed to be thrilled with his new partner's "underdog" status. That partner was Microsoft.

I almost feel like that's enough of a post in and of itself, and with the holidays upon us I am tempted to leave it.

But it is a subject too fascinating to resist.

How did Microsoft go from being an international target of anti-monopolists, and the presumed Winner of the race to permanent computing relevance, to a company that by any stretch of the imagination might be called, with barely a responding whimper from any quarter, "underdog"?

Is it because the Great Gates has left the building--to give away his billions for good (and to my loud applause)?

Is it because the Nemesis Jobs is back with more vengeance than the damaging aftershocks of a California earthquake?

Is it because of Facebook?

No, it is none of these--though all are probably contributors.

The reason Microsoft fell from its silicon throne is because of one simple fact known to many and denied by few: the company never made a very good product.

By this I do not mean it did not ever make a good, serviceable product. Its products have always been serviceable. They long satisfied the rather stodgy computing needs of an old corporate culture prone to inefficiency, obscurantism and rabid internal protection of turf especially in the IT operations.

But Microsoft has never, ever made a product anyone actually wanted--or even preferred.

Does this only go to prove the negative myths about Gates and Company? That he is the World's Luckiest Man for having landed that absurd little contract with IBM where he would supply the silly "operating system" for that former computing titan's "personal computer" offering (remember Charlie Chaplin getting all that stuff done with his PC?)? That MSFT did indeed enjoy a practical monopoly on the OS for many years, and therefore, with every PC paying MSFT a royalty, had no need to innovate when cash rolled in with little to no effort expended and in volume almost too great to count it all? That they never really cared about their customers? That they were insular and all pocket-protector-y when the world was starting to see computing as hip and connected and even fun?

Again, all these are factors. The rebirth of Apple and its plans that have gone well beyond PCs is proof that imagination and innovation pays off. The internet itself proves that the oppenness of systems (polar opposite of MSFT's vision) is a juggernaut that shall never be stopped. And the advent of a generation that tweets so much it can't even remember what a spreadsheet was, certainly makes for a poor prospect in the Microsoft astrological chart.

None of these would matter, had Microsoft ever made a product anyone actually wanted. Not "needed for work" or "used because it was the standard" or "because it was included". I mean "wanted"--as in "gotta have this way cool thing". Make way for a long list of those non-Microsoft products going all the way back to the 1990s: PageMaker (Aldus); Photoshop (Adobe); Quark (Quark); the Internet (Pentagon); Java (Sun); HTML (Berners-Lee/CERN); Flash (Adobe); Browser (well, okay: Explorer, but that falls under "included"; but more and more, Firefox et al); email (numerous and often web-based for the consumer); on-line video (YouTube); on-line community (Facebook); and lastly and perhaps most importantly in the long run: the wealth of superior gear streaming out of Cupertino including the iMac, the iPod, the iPad, iTunes, The Beatles...need we go on?

To counter any of these, what has Microsoft done? Its photo-manipulation tools are so poor as to have no market presence whatever. The same for its publishing attempts. Outlook is a good email client but not spectacular and , like all Microsoft offerings, annoyingly complex without that complexity adding any value. Blackberry? Video? On line community? The Beatles? Nothing there. By the way, has anyone noticed how dreadful "Windows Phones" really are?

The Bellevue firm has offered bloated, run of the mill products that make no bones about needing much processing power to deliver little value. Word. Excel. SQL. Windows OS/Windows Servers. The list is long. The market has already provided free (as in "no money") versions of all these. Only Excel seems to have made itself a truly useful standard of sorts. And can we get in the hoary jibe that Microsoft Windows itself, an obvious clone of the Apple interface, defeated a court-case challenge to its existence on technicalities and not because it isn't a cold, look-you-in-the-eye imitation of an interface invented on a different corporate campus by a computing company that at the time was sort of struggling?

They have tried to convince us they "innovate". Don't they make (or license) the fabulous Zune MP3 listening device? I think they do. Don't they have tablet computers? Why, yes, and the screen pivots! And doesn't MSN have stacks of cool features for interacting and sharing information with your friends? Well, yes, but...

...but little of these or any other product Microsoft has ever made can be called better than average. And many of them are downright losers. Anyone remember "MSN", which would rival the Internet? No? Anyone remember that "MSNBC" was the product of a partnership between MSFT and NBC and was supposed to become an on line information juggernaut? I like Rachel Maddow as much as the next guy/gal, but an on line information juggernaut MSNBC is not.

Even their Operating System, improved as it has become, has never by the stretch of anyone's imagination come close to "elegant" or "easy" or "clean" or even "non-kludgy". Never. If you are a PC user, it was just there because of a stranglehold contract Microsoft has with most PC manufacturers (another hapless lot whose fortunes deserve a blog post if not an encyclopedia). Many of the more savvy computing folks we know quickly install, for free, the opensource Ubuntu OS and Star Office so they never have to look at another poorly designed splash screen flushed from the gates of Gates and Company.

Nothing Microsoft can do can really seem to stem this tide. Its name alone reeks of the creaky, geeky days of early computing. Can you think of two less appealing words to make a name out of? Micro (small) and soft (weak)? Clearly no one was thinking about branding when the name was made official, and it didn't matter. They had the IBM contract.

They have ridden that IBM contract pony about as far as it can go. At some point they will need either to innovate or to begin spending their own money on operations. I see no plans for any believable innovation. I do see a holding operation. And I would submit it is probably a mistake for Facebook to team with Microsoft, as there appears no natural synergy between the missions of the two companies.

Microsoft has come to be an underdog because it has never had an ear for its customer. Probably never undertook serious-enough marketing analytics to find trends that could be leveraged by inspiration into cascades of gold. Probably didn't make enough adjustment based on study of cosnumer-generated quantitative data. Probably assumed it knew best as it was, after all, the great Microsoft.

In Ozymandias too, there is a great stone head lying in the sand, evidence of another colossal empire reduced to dust. And I have it on good authority that the ruler at Ozymandias never had much use for user-analytics, either.