MSFT drops the ball. Again.

Microsoft Surface has been around for, what? 5 years now?

Think of it as a large iPad on steroids, but with tremendously improved touch functionality.

Not surprisingly, MSFT’s web site on the product is simply awful. No dynamism. No excitement. A narrative as thrilling as the instruction book for repairing a washing machine. What is it with Microsoft? Even the ‘copy and paste’ link does not work!

If I was marketing this product I would make sure to give free versions to every major film studio, news channel, publishing house and famous photographer I could find, make it sell for $3,000 and watch it take off. I have seen it used twice – once on a TV news show and once in a James Bond movie, both times to jaw dropping effect. And if I was MSFT, I wouldn’t care about the profit or loss. They have already lost millions on it. What I would care about is the tremendous halo effect it would have on my other mass market products. It’s a simple variant of ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ in the car world. Porsche wins Le Mans? You buy a new 911.

Microsoft Surface – click to view the boring video.

Steve Jobs’s was so right all those years ago when he said ‘Microsoft has no taste’. Even when they make ground breaking products like Surface and Kinect, their marketing, in a word, sucks.

Watch it from the man himself.

You can even get to enjoy the world’s worst CEO in this video – though he has strong competition from Howard Stringer at Sony. Here Ballmer extols Windows ’95 which most would agree was the worst OS ever. Or was that Windows ME?