Tag microsoft

Steps Towards Irrelevance

Mary Jo Foley, Microsoftphile and tech writer (since the company's early years) writes, when asked about the future of Microsoft's leadership once Bill Gates retires:
There's always been this dichotomy between "Bill's guys" and "Steve's guys." Steve's guys have MBAs and their roots are in sales. Bill's guys have been traditional technologists. The people who are more like Steve will probably get more power and will run the show, so I wonder who's going to be the tech champion for Bill's guys. I think that's going to be a big cultural and noticeable change once Gates is out from his day-to-day duties.
That's funny. Microsoft has been pretty much excellent in marketing and sales for many years, but mediocre (or even poor in some cases) in engineering and technology. If "Bill's guys" have been running the show all these years, how will "Steve's guys" help Microsoft overcome its pretty obvious technological problems without squandering its strategy? I'm guessing if Steve Ballmer is going to stay --- which he probably is --- Microsoft will probably move a bit faster, but still quite gradually, towards irrelevance. It's not salesmen and marketers that make or break a company like this. It's not technologists either. It's visionaries, pioneers and innovators. Microsoft never really had many of those in positions of power, and it desperately needs them to compete in today's market. Innovation and a solid vision for the future have always been at the fringes of corporate policy at Microsoft or in Bill Gates' books and lectures. Sadly, I doubt the 'MBAs' and 'salespeople' that are going to run the show in Redmond for the next few years have any clue as to what any of that mean.

Heavy-handed tactics and Misdeeds

It seems that OOXML, the Microsoft patent-riddled trojan horse and miserable excuse of a standard (let alone an open one) has been approved by ISO, following Norway's and Britain's mysterious (and very suspicious) change of heart. At the same time, 'a number of delegates from the 87 national standards groups have been loudly complaining about alleged heavy-handed tactics and misdeeds in the voting process'. Even if Microsoft products didn't suck, that would be reason enough to actively embargo them.

A plan that will mandate the use of open standards and open source software government-wide

Say the Dutch. And that's excellent news. Government is perhaps the foremost market segment where open source can thrive, evolve and gradually be positioned so as to make inroads in the enterprise. Holland plans to be running open software by mid 2008 at a national (central government) level and 2009 for local and state organisations. Interestingly, according to The Register, the bill was not opposed in parliament, despite Microsoft's protests; on the other hand, I'm sure that many in the Netherlands may be somewhat frustrated by this, although in the longterm I'm sure they'll appreciate the difference. The message is clear: Open Up or be excluded. Who's next?

FakeStevey got it…wrong.

Check this post by Fake Steve Jobs. It's hilarious and not just because it nails what the real Steve Jobs probably thinks of Openness, but also because it highlights what was always wrong with his approach: whenever his companies were weak (NeXT in the late 80s and early 90s, Apple in the late 90s and early 2000s) he touted Openness, standards and formed alliances with other companies. Take Adobe's Display PostScript in NeXTSTEP, Darwin, Display PDF, OpenGL, OpenAL, CUPS, UNIX certification, gcc and a number of other standards, APIs, libraries and applications between 2001 and today in OS X or his 'agreement' with Microsoft in 1997. But just when things do well, he tries to usurp the dominant position, showing complete disregard to their partners, development community, users and sometimes even employees. In my discussions about Android with friends over the past day I compared Google with Microsoft in the 80s. Many have done the same. This comment by 'chickenface' in the linked article is, I believe, representative of how I see Android evolving and eventually dominating the market:
This is 1984, the iphone is the 128K Mac, and GPhone is the PC. Look, there's no actual consortium; there's Google and its customers. Kinda like Apple and AT&T, but they've got so many customers we're calling it a consortium. When're you gonna get this straight: Microsoft were like the Klingons - we made a sort of peace with them and held our nose. Google, they're way worse -- they're the Borg.

Desktops of the future…

It was in 1990 that Microsoft released Windows 3.0, making the PC the dominant platform as it is today, by providing a cheap, easy to use environment for people to use and developers to program (without the horrible Apple royalties that had to be paid for Macintosh development at the time). Windows 3.0, as other […]