Software giant Microsoft got a slap on the nose with a rolled up newspaper by founder Paul Allen this morning.
Speaking to Bloomberg , Allen said that Vole was mucking about and not getting enough new products on the shelves fast enough.
Allen is in the press a bit lately for his new biography where, if we have read it correctly, he claims he was out saving the world while Bill Gates was pulling the wings off flies. The book "The Idea Man" more or less claims that Allen was a tortured business artist who was not appreciated by the oiks and riff-raff of the IT industry. .
However the founder, and now one of the world's richest blokes, said that Redmond "needs to accelerate the pace of product development" to compete with Google and Apple.
Allen is not the first one to complain that Vole is taking far too long to get products out there. The common belief is that the outfit is so big that managers are too busy playing politics to get any products out.
He said that Microsoft's Windows 7 phone software and XBox Kinect sensors were "resonating with a younger audience" as the company tries to "get more momentum." He seems to have some inside knowledge about Windows Phone 7 that the rest of the world has not seen.
Unlike Ballmer, who has been looking at making incursions into the Kingdom of the Dull people and make business software, Allen thinks that consumer stuff is where it is at.
Allen said that Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs' transformation of Apple since his return in 1997 has been "unbelievable" - particularly that hat-trick with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
As a result there is now a three horse race for global domination between Apple, Google and Vole.
Microsoft is still struggling with their strong OS legacy. Their experience seems to translate reasonably well to laptops and games consoles but they are struggling with smaller devices. This is also shown that they only started to get anywhere as the processing power of the small portable devices increased significantly.
A reason for this is that MS can't kick the habit of using resources wastefully. As an example, a company I know of uses the same hardware for slightly different applications globally. With different develpment teams scattered around the world, some used Windows others Linux for appplications with essentially very similar applications. It may be starnge but it was probably based on their experience experience and with an embedded PC architecture, a fair bit of flexibility is provided.
Anyway, the point is that to provide similar performance for similar applications, the Windows boxes required twice the memory, and a faster processor. The only advantage for windows was shown for grapics, simply because the graphics companies only care about optimising their Win drivers.
No it's not. It's Windows Phone 7 is not resonating with anyone. Neither young nor old. In fact, nobody is buying it.
Just take a look at the latest ComScore figures. The addition of Windows Phone 7 has done nothing to stop Microsoft's plummeting mobile market share. It's in freefall. A death spiral.
Windows Phone 7 is a dead duck. Microsoft is apparently going to reset its mobile platform yet again (can you believe?) and use its desktop Windows 8 (ported to ARM) for both tablets and phones. Microsoft says Windows 8 runs "on everything".
For the rest of us, we can right off Microsoft's chances in mobile. It means we'll have to look to MeeGo as an alternative phone platform.