Many product development, marketing, and project management programs in the world’s leading universities love to use Microsoft as an example of how not to develop a new product or service and then, subsequently, how not to bring that new product or service to market. While some of Microsoft’s most popular programs such as the Windows operating system and its Microsoft Office suite of business productivity software are extremely successful and extremely profitable, they are increasingly the only areas of the company’s business that are although the Xbox 360 product is somewhat of a success anomaly but only partially so. The fact remains that Microsoft is such a good pinata to use in business schools because it completely fails to understand just how integral a company’s organizational culture is to its creative DNA. For example, product managers and marketing professors love to point out just how much Apple’s success relates to its inherent ability to create and innovate in areas that are increasingly far afield from its original computing platform.

In contrast, Microsoft, which has all the money and capital necessary to create and innovate without equal in the industry continually, fails to do so. The company’s efforts to introduce new products such as the Kin One and Kin Two mobile phones and mobile phone platform which have been recently discontinued after just a few weeks on the market and some 10,000 sold are illustrative of just how much the firm’s executives do not “get it.” This is just a long line of products and services that the firm has thought that it would revolutionize the consumer markets with. For instance, did you know that Microsoft once touted a Smart Watch service it coined SPOT and which would transmit data over FM radio waves to subscribers? Right, I didn’t think so but this product was available on all major online retailing sites such as Amazon.com, among others. Of course you are familiar with Zune, Microsoft’s digital music player, the perennial also-ran in the industry? What about Microsoft Bob which was a program developed in 1995 that was designed to make the Windows platform easier to use for computing novices? Right, customers that wanted a computing platform that was easier to use just bought a Mac and the company’s executives, once again, did get that rather than develop yet another program to interface with a GUI designed to interface with the computer’s underlying OS maybe it should just redesign its GUI—whatever.

Microsoft is the stuff of legend for all the wrong reasons and business school programs love to discuss its market failures like the Playforsure technology that, as it turned out, could not play with anybody’s digital music platform because of the company’s ridiculous digital management software and, in fact, once it was cancelled none of the files could even be played on the company’s new digital music platform which was the Zune. In short, Microsoft seems be mired in endless layers of organizational bureaucracy, be controlled by a top-down mentality, have a product/service development process designed to attempt to manipulate the consumer rather than design based on consumer demand, and to be inordinately focused on maintaining its dominance through proprietary business models.

Toyota’s problems with sudden acceleration are well-known. Toyota has long been an icon of quality and efficiency in terms of its production and manufacturing standards. Thus, business schools and graduate business programs have often assigned Toyota as the topic for quality based research papers about such topics like the Toyota Production System or TPS or the lean manufacturing process. Additionally, business course research papers have focused on subjects like just-in-time or related processes that are utilized by Toyota to achieve its highly touted quality. Yet, the sudden acceleration issues that have been occurring over the past few years with some of its cars have done much to undermine the company’s sterling reputation for quality. These issues have also undermined the trust that the consumer had in the company as well as led to a devaluation of its products which harms consumers yet again because trade-in values have plummeted for Toyota products. Finally, Toyota’s handling of the situation has been the subject of much ridicule as well because has done nothing but attempt to deny that a problem exists and then only came to acknowledge them first as floor mat problems and then as mechanical issues in the gas pedal and finally it is being revealed that the real issue is likely the company’s electronics. Clearly these are complicated subjects and we have writers who are very knowledgeable in this subject area who can produce clear and articulate research projects from essays to dissertations related to Toyota’s quality problems.