I wonder if Microsoft will ever learn. Probably not.

These guys have a history of never doing anything new. They see what others are doing, and they try to recreate it. They overload their copy with tons of extra features, and then they claim theirs is the best.

They’re too close to the technology. The brains at Microsoft design things that other brains can operate — devices laden with options and features, designed for power users, as if everyone in the world were a power user.

Microsoft saw the MacOS and gave us Windows. Microsoft saw WordPerfect and gave us Word. Microsoft saw AppleWorks and gave us Excel. Microsoft saw Netscape and gave us Internet Explorer.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Windows, Excel, Word, and IE are all successful products. Yes, but they’re all worse than the products they copied. Microsoft’s success on these products was built on the strength of their market share, not on the quality of the products. Those products succeeded by brute force marketing tactics, not by innovation.

You don’t believe me? Microsoft saw the iPod, and gave us the Zune. Oops. Microsoft saw the Playstation and gave us the XBox. Oops. Granted, in the case of the XBox, their R&D team added value in the followup: the XBox 360 actually innovated.

But now Microsoft sees the Wii… and in typical Microsoft fashion, they’ve decided to try to kill it with brute force. Just have a look at what Microsoft has planned for their next game box.

No controllers? Body recognition? Perhaps the marketing guys who made that video never considered that a fat guy can’t jump like a skinny kid. If fat guys and skinny kids and nerds and athletes and cripples could all do the same things, they would be out there in the real world competing at them.

The reason kung-fu games are popular is because they give fat guys and skinny kids a way of being the badass that they’ll never get to be in real life. It doesn’t matter what your genes are — as long as you have the capacity to press buttons with your hands or feet or whatever, you can become a martial arts master, or ride a snowboard, or drive a Ferrari, or kill terrorists. No exercise or special diet necessary.

Hey, Microsoft! Go ahead and release your “Wii killer”. You’ll learn a really valuable lesson. Or, more likely, you won’t learn a thing. You never have.