Jobs predicted Vista woes

Assuaging Wall Street impacts product development.

Hey, category managers in charge of IT spend. Want to make yourself a friend of the business for life? I’ve got a secret for you: don’t rubberstamp your CIO’s decision to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007. In fact, tack on a big “reject” to the request or the requisition. And don’t do it to save money. Do it to save your hide.

Having spent approximately 25 of my last 40 waking hours trying to get Vista and Office 2007 to perform at the level of my previous operating system and desktop environment, I can honestly say that it’s an absolute travesty that Microsoft would have released such a half-baked product, having put billions into its development. In fact, my friends, colleagues and clients will probably attest to my slower than average response rates via email recently (I simply have not had the patience or the time to write emails while the new composer catches up with my typing).

And then, there’s this:

A bug in Windows Vista’s built-in antipiracy technology is telling some users that they need to reactivate the operating system after they install new device drivers or run newly installed software.

Microsoft Corp. quietly issued a patch designed to fix the flaw in its Software Protection Platform (SPP) technology late last month. Criticized by some when it was announced last fall, SPP is an updated and more aggressive version of the Windows Genuine Advantage antipiracy tools that Microsoft included with Windows XP. But because of the bug, SPP may suddenly demand that a copy of Vista be “activated” even though the user and/or the computer maker did so earlier.

Wow.

Here’s what Steve Jobs said about Microsoft in 2004:

Q: What can we learn from Apple’s struggle to innovate during the decade before you returned in 1997?
A: You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn’t add up to much. That’s what was missing at Apple for a while. There were bits and pieces of interesting things floating around, but not that gravitational pull.

People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it’s easy to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that. But there’s a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That’s a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.

But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM (IBM ) is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.

Q: Is this common in the industry?
A: Look at Microsoft (MSFT ) — who’s running Microsoft?

Q: Steve Ballmer.
A: Right, the sales guy. Case closed. And that’s what happened at Apple, as well.

Read this again:

But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.

Case closed indeed.

Update: This is getting ridiculous. In an article questioning Vista’s value, Microsoft General Manger Brad Brooks argues that Windows is a bargain: “If you break down the cost of the software over the life of the PC, it works out to be less than how much you’d spend on milk for your family over that same period of time.”
Hmm, I don’t remember seeing Vista on the food pyramid.