Earlier today I had a pretty interesting conversation with an old college friend who happens to work for Microsoft about the status of their company.  She told me of a recent good experience she had at the corporate store, which led to a discussion about the upcoming Microsoft retail stores.  I have blogged about that topic before, so I won’t rehash those thoughts.  The thing that I did start to wonder is what happened to the Microsoft we used to know?  What happened to the company that used to actually innovate instead of strictly duplicate.

I remember back to my early college days in the mid 90′s when the web was still in its infancy.  The first web browser I ever used was NCSA Mosaic which at the time I thought was pretty cool.  Then came the days of Netscape and ultimately I moved to Internet Explorer full time.  Around this same time I distinctly remember the big hype that was Windows 95 as it was a huge departure from the Windows 3.x world I had come to learn.

Through the late 90′s Microsoft reigned supreme at almost all things computing related, then one day everything magically changed.  First companies like Yahoo and Alta Vista came around with search engines as a way to find information on the Internet and Microsoft was magically missing from this market.  We all know what happened next when Google came in and basically kicked everyone in the face and became a household name.

On the OS side of the house Microsoft still had a very tight reign over the market as Apple struggled to define who they were.  Of course that was until they invented the iPod and iTunes and the rest is pretty much history.  Once again for years, Microsoft remained miraculously quiet until they finally had to act.  This brought us the well-known Zune.  While the device was actually superior to the iPod in many respects, it never has gotten a firm foothold in a market dominated by Apple.

In a matter of just a few years, it seems that Microsoft has gone from being a market leader to constantly playing catchup in their leading business segments.  The only two products that have remained consistently strong all this time are Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange, which are pretty much defacto standards in their respective categories.

So what happened to the company that used to rule the world?  More importantly how do you fix it?  Any thoughts you have are greatly appreciated.  I have lots of thoughts and suggestions, but I’ll save that for another blog post.