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Microsoft developers conference falls flat, is Apple next?

Kevin Chupka
·Executive Producer/Writer

CEO Satya Nadella is leading Microsoft’s (MSFT) developers conference today, outlining Windows 10 and a series of new apps. It’s not the same sort of splashy launch the company had nearly 20 years ago for Windows 95. That release was celebrated with an expensive and memorable ad campaign featuring the Rollings Stones’ “Start me up,” and launch day lines that were a first for a box of software.

It would be 12 years before people started camping out overnight for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone but the pomp with which Microsoft announced the operating system certainly influenced the way Steve Jobs launched his products as well.

“It’s marketing,” says Yahoo Finance Editor in Chief Andy Serwer, “and it’s hard if you’re a tech company because the products are not as exciting...If you’re a software company you basically have a product that you can’t see so you need...the Rolling Stones.”

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Now, in 2015, the world still seems to stop and listen when Apple tells it to, as it did last fall when Tim Cook announced the Apple Watch. Microsoft, Google (GOOGL), even our parent company Yahoo (YHOO) all have developer conferences, but not even the company that started the whole frenzy gets much more than a momentary glance from tech blogs these days.

So might Apple’s big announcements one day be shrugged off in much the same way? Is the company destined for a Microsoft-like fate; losing its cool factor to the next big tech Goliath?

“There will come a time when we look back at the Apple smartphone releases and say ‘what were we all getting so crazy about,” says Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli. “People used to get excited for next year's Chevy (GM). We used to actually talk about that; ‘what’s different, what’s the same?’ Yeah they still have car shows but nobody really talks about it because a car has a sameness to it now.”

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