Why Didn’t Ballmer Build Any of This? ⇥ bloomberg.com

In the “innate ability to fuck up the simplest things” file, Dina Bass, Bloomberg:

Microsoft filmed a bunch of concept videos to illustrate its product ideas. You can watch an edited version of the videos at the top of this post. Cheesiness aside, it’s pretty spot-on, no? There’s personalized content for each family member synchronized across PCs, televisions, tablets, mobile phones and cars; location-aware devices that tell you when friends are nearby; photo-sharing; voice controls — all years before Facebook, Foursquare, or Apple’s iCloud and Siri.

More incredible than the foresight of these videos is how Microsoft failed to execute on nearly all of it. What went wrong? Well, lots of things.