Making lofty claims is nothing new in the technology sector. Every company claims they are the leader in their space. Over the years we have seen many a over-the-top marketing quotes from technology executives deriding their competition or showmanship in highlighting their “greatest-product-since-slice bread” over their competitors.
But Microsoft executive Ron Markezich outdid all of them recently during his announcement of the reduced prices for Microsoft cloud products by calling other competitors like Zoho and Google Apps – fake office products. This to me is the most comical way to counter a threat to your companies. Never mind that growing user base of those “fake” products that reduces customers’ TCO and never mind the bloat it reduces from your ever hungry desktops – Shame on you Zoho and Google for releasing “fake” products. And while we are at it – Shame on you IBM for continuing to pursue selling your “fake” Lotus suite and building a business doing that.
As for me, I am a big fan of the “Fake” products and concur with fellow “fake” product fan Vinnie Mirchandani when he says – “If this is fake give us plenty more”. No fake no innovation.
Upon further analysis of these shameless “fake” pretenders, to my surprise and I am sure these have escaped Ron’s attention, I found a 5 more fakes that Microsoft should come up strategy to combat . (No. I promise Mark Cuban did not help me come up with this list.)
- Larry Ellison – shame on you for creating a “fake” database and what’s more shameless is you did it without even buying the IP from Sybase.
- Larry and Sergei – Shame on you for claiming a “fake” search engine as the best in the world and shame on the world for taking their side.
- Steve Jobs – shame on you for “faking” people with a glorified hard-disk with a lacquered cover to store songs and calling it iPod.
- Marc Benioff – shame on you for coming up with a “fake” application platform called Force.com, on which companies can easily build and deploy their application in cloud, without spending millions.
- Mozilla group for shamelessly mobilizing people all over the world to build a more secure and fast “fake” browser.
It never ceases to amaze me that these people build successful business entirely based on these “fake” products.
“How would you have handled it smart guy”, you ask?
My response, in Ron’s shoes, would have been – “If you see the track record of office products, you will see a lot of innovation that has come from our product team. This new competition posed by these smaller startups should only encourage our product team to step up and come up with the next round of innovation.”
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