Momentum Swing for Apple?

Finally he seems to have stopped being in denial and thats a sign that he acknowledges the competition and the progress they have made at WM's expense, maybe now MS will start to get themselves in gear and give WM the upgrade it needs.

While I love my WM phone, they definitely need to do something to step up their game in the mobile space and fast if they want to be a sizable player 2-3 years down the road. What's sad is they have an outright amazing ecosystem when you factor in things like the Xbox, Zune, MediaCenter, Windows, Office, Live, etc. Yet they're so massive and disjointed they can't bring them all together to make a compelling, cohesive end-to-end experience across even their own platforms.

Besides the disjointedness, probably the biggest problem MS has across most of their products though is that they're not really a brand like Apple, Google, Blackberry, etc. Sure, people know the name Microsoft. But at this point they're almost a GE-like holding company for numerous smaller ventures. They may be too big now to try and make the overarching Microsoft ecosystem (assuming it's ever tied together nicely) into a brand. But they need to do a much better job of getting out there and advertising/promoting the various brands they do have. And to be fair, they're finally starting to do that some now (although after more than a decade of relative brand advertising silence, it's going to take strong, steady exposure for several years to turn that tide.) Apple fanboys can point to the tech and user experience all they want, but at the end of the day, the average joe uses them because of the brand appeal built up via their advertising.

this is one of the things i've always hated about large, almost too large, companies. They when hit with new competition find themselves in a continual state of denial when they actually do have the ability to quickly adapt and change. Then when they find themselves at the end of their downward slope, they suddenly find the ability to see the error in their ways.

In short, i hate the thinking and most large companies, because they are simply arrogant.