quote:
"Although Office XP Subscription Licence was a popular offering, research showed the subscription model was not well understood by customers participating in the pilot. Customers and computer resellers from across New Zealand, Australia and France had the opportunity to be the first in the world to assess the subscription licensing model. From their feedback, we learnt that customers find subscriptions a useful method of purchasing software but are not ready to fully adopt this process... The consumer market just isn't ready for subscription-based software yet. The concept of software delivered as a service is new to consumers and right now the target market just didn't understand."
Here is the main reason M$ will ultimately fail. Notice just how arrogant that is! It couldn't
possibly be due to the fact that these folks understood all too well just what M$ was doing, and that they just plain didn't like the idea, or that they believed that it wasn't right for their own situations. According to M$, that's not a possibility. The damn fools were just too st00pid to understand what a wonderful thing that M$ was trying to do for them. The entire corporate culture is incapable of admitting to an error in judgement, to being just plain wrong in reading the market or understanding their customers and their needs.
So long as they hold their own customers in such contempt, they will continue to mis-read the market, continue to alienate their own customers, continue to push the paying public to alternatives such as Linux, until, in the end, they have no more customers.
History repeats itself. This was the same mistake GM made in the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn't that all those Japanese cars were so good; it was that GM pushed away its own customers. Now look where GM is today: just another car company among many, no longer the King of the Road.
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Computers are like air conditioners: they can't do their jobs if you open windows.
