Microsoft Has No Idea What They’re Doing

This is supposed to be a commercial for the Microsoft Surface Pro. If you’ve been to a movie theater in the past few months, chances are you’ve seen this dance routine accompanied by a short detailing how the commercial was made. I still have no idea what the tablet can do.

Compare this to their direct competitors in this area: Apple.

Apple details exactly what their devices capabilities are. The strengths of the iPad 4 are clearly stated, and the commercial reads more like a press release straight to their customers. Even their 30-60 second commercials are more direct and straight to the point. Microsoft just misses the point.

It’s no different in the console realm at the moment. Iwata and Reggie point out everything about the WiiU and 3DS through Nintendo Direct. It may as well be a press conference, but every one is receiving the same data at the same time.

Although Nintendo isn’t Microsoft’s main competitor; Sony is. The confusion over how shared games would work is a huge point. The XBox One was going to have the future of sharing entire game libraries with up to ten people; the confusion was whether or not this would be an hour demo or the complete game. Sony released a commercial overnight mocking this:

Microsoft has no clear idea what they’re doing any more. They backtracked on a good portion of the XBox One’s “features” due to bad press, but the public didn’t even know what those features fully entailed. There was no option to opt out of them either to limit accessibility.

For example: when you use an iOS device the terms and conditions state that you should be syncing to a computer to receive full functionality (as far as backing up your information goes). All Microsoft needed was a console that’d let you play offline for longer than 24 hours; maybe, as a repercussion, achievements wouldn’t work or you’d be unable to share games to your ten people. Instead, consumers initially received: “If you don’t have an always online connection, there’s still XBox 360.” Then there was the full backpedal of all of the restrictions.

It doesn’t help that the backpedal was after E3. Microsoft really needs to come together with a unifying vision for their company and actually sell their products.