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Microsoft Having a Bad Year
By Richard Nantel | March 12, 2008
First, the software giant’s $44.6 billion offer to purchase Yahoo was rebuffed, sending Microsoft back to the boardroom to plot its next move.
Then, the European Union fined Microsoft $1.35 billion for failing to comply with a 2004 ruling that found that Microsoft had withheld interoperability information from its competitors.
Then, last week, a judge made available to the public internal Microsoft e-mails related to a lawsuit over the “Windows Vista Capable” program. You can read about this on Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog.
This makes for entertaining reading. For example, we learn that a Microsoft board member, Jon Shirley, sent an e-mail to Steve Balmer:
“who explained that he upgraded one of his computers to Windows Vista only to find it was experiencing compatibility problems with two of Microsoft’s own MSN applications. Shirley wasn’t upgrading his other computer because of a lack of hardware drivers.”
We also learn of
“[Microsoft] executive Mike Nash’s complaint that compatibility problems turned his $2,100 PC into nothing more than an “e-mail machine.”
Ouch.
A colleague of mine said that these disclosed e-mails will likely be great for Apple. People will abandon the PC/Windows platform and instead migrate to Macs. Some certainly will.
But, more likely, this will be just one more nail in the coffin for big operating systems and desktop software. The masses will begin to see a pattern in their computer purchasing history:
- You buy a new computer pre-loaded with whatever operating system Microsoft is currently selling.
- The computer works great. You’re thrilled.
- Then you install your software applications and find that some don’t work anymore.
- Others do work, but strange little things begin to appear: the occasional crash, slowdowns, Outlook can’t send those seven e-mails in your outbox unless you reboot, etc.
- Then you save up and buy some new component, such as a bigger monitor, and the computer starts crashing regularly. You know you have an interoperability problem between the OS and the display driver, but, having installed the latest driver, there’s not much you can do.
A new computer is like a garden. So neat and perfect when you’ve just planted the seedlings in the spring. A few months later, your computer is that same garden after you’ve been away on vacation for the month of August. It’s so overgrown with weeds that you can no longer distinguish what you intended to grow.
Increasingly, people will realize that big fat operating systems and desktop applications are more of a hassle than a benefit. They’ll be happy with a simple computer and operating system, a keyboard, mouse, speakers, camera, microphone, printer, and, most importantly, an Internet connection.
Web-based applications are popping up all the time that allow you to do much of what you normally do with big desktop software applications. Best of all, these applications rarely force you to install anything that will corrupt the registry of your computer or cause a driver incompatibility.
We’re embracing Web applications here at Brandon Hall Research. We’ve even switched to an online version of our accounting software, allowing us to access our financial data from anywhere on almost any computer.
I suspect that, within two years, I’ll no longer be using desktop software. My workstation will have a hard disk that will store backups of my files. But, my working documents will be online, created with Web-based applications.
Because of middle-age eyesight, my next computer will, though, require a big high-resolution monitor. So, I hope the display driver issue is resolved by then.
Postscript:
In recent days, Microsoft has lowered the price of the Vista operating system by up to 40 percent in about 70 countries.
March 12th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I am moving my company to the cloud too. But unlike what MS is offering for their version of Exchange online (newly released); we are sticking to one of their resellers that have figured how to provide amazing service. We use a private branded version of Exchange Online through groupSPARK (http://www.groupspark.com/) and get great 24/7 service for our mission critical email data. I sleep at night – which is even better than a big screen for aging eyes…..