Satya Nadella shakes up Microsoft, appoints 'Scroogled' man Mark Penn as strategy chief Reports have emerged of new senior appointments at Microsoft, events that are being interpreted as new CEO Satya Nadella putting his stamp on the organisation. According to Re/Code and Bloomberg, Mark Penn will soon be confirmed as chief strategy officer. The two outlets also report that Skype supremo Tony Bates and head of …
"Responsible for Microsoft’s global advertising and marketing strategy". Say what you like about Microsoft but advertising and marketing in recent years have failed in so many ways its hard to imagine what will happen if the guy who claims to be responsible gets to meddle in other parts of the company strategy.
Those quoted paragraphs of BS have made me feel a little queasy. This sentence in particular "He also oversees a multidisciplinary SWAT team that deals with a range of projects involving marketing, media and compete." Really, he has a SWAT team? What the hell does that mean in this context? If you refuse to sign the MS contract you get raided? Then we get to "compete" what the heck is that? Gah!!
So far Nadella looks like he's started off OK. There are signs that MS have come to terms with the new reality and are starting to play nice with open source and actually listening to their customers. This is in contrast to the Ballmer/Gates days when they ran the business in a crisis management/we are at war mode which basically pissed of the whole developer community. The failure to embrace the windows phone can be seen as payback for that .For customers It was interesting that the XBox 1 had it's price cut indicating that they realise the MS name no longer carries a premium.
But those are the easy changes. They were obvious to anyone outside MS, it was just the old management were too pig-headed to admit how wrong they were. The real challenge will be changing the corporate culture and making up for the lost years. It is obvious that some in MS still don't get it (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx). It will take a while until such attitudes are either removed or redefined.
His group’s goals include creating world-class advertising and messaging to consumers and business customers delivered through the most cost-effective and scientific means available.
Ah yes who can forget world class advertising such as this iPhone funeral when Windows Phone was announced -
http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/16584_funeral_1.jpg
One constant throughout Microsoft's existence is that their advertising has always been cringingly bad.
I don't know who is responsible but I have never seen a MS advert that ever made me want to buy or use a MS product.
While Apple sold cool, MS seemed determined to sell 'we are not very good, but you have to buy us anyway'
Take the advert where a bloke on a train tells us he bought a surface PC because he could do work on an overcrowded train. My 1st thought on seeing that was the people in 1st class were probably using Apple Mac's and iPads.So by a PC and be part of the herd.
Their marketing department need to be fired.
Who can forget the XBox name and how sales and marketing didn't like it. When asking the public what they liked XBox came out top. XBox was only included in the list of choices to demonstrate it was a bad name, the public did not agree.
Once I saw this, I could never quite look at another MS advert / product again without remembering it:
> One constant throughout Microsoft's existence is that their advertising has always been cringingly bad.
Oh gosh yes.
They're so friggin' embarassing.
It's like being at a party and watching one of your drunken friends hitting on everything with a skirt...and doing it loudly.
Just for once I would like to see Microsft talking up their products rather then talking down their competition. Like political attack ads, they're all a race to the bottom.
"If reports of her [Tami Reller's] demise are correct it perhaps signals Microsoft distancing itself further from those who made the world so tepidly enthusiastic about Windows 8."
She's like Baghdad Bob - tasked with putting a positive spin on abysmal failure. In both cases it's not the messenger's fault that they've got nothing positive to report.
Penn's background is as a political adviser - an environment where badmouthing the opposition is the only form of self promotion.
To me, MS are saying that their strategy will continue to be that of ridiculing competing products rather than actually engineering innovative products that people want to buy and compelling services that people want to use.
The blundering incompetence of Mark Penn's organisation during the 2008 American quarter-finals was a major factor in costing Hillary Clinton her anointed place as the Democratic Party's hereditary nominee for the Presidential election that year. I assumed that after that debacle he had slunk off to find a big enough rock to crawl under and was lost to History and civilised company forever with only the millions of bucks he had charged her campaign in the process of sinking it to console himself with.
"... it perhaps signals Microsoft distancing itself further from those who made the world so tepidly enthusiastic about Windows 8."
Tepidly enthusiastic? TEPIDLY enthusiastic??
Awww ... c'mon, now! As tepidly enthusiastic as having a snapping turtle in yer bathtub? As tepidly enthusiastic as finding a turd in yer teapot? As tepidly enthusiastic as enduring a cavity-search at the airport?
Tepid? Really??
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