Does the One Trick Pony Have Anything Else to Offer?

Many of you predicted this almost ten years ago. When Steve Ballmer, the sales guru came out of the shadows and replaced Bill Gates as the official spokesperson for the company we knew that things were about to be entertaining. For those that knew him, Ballmer was the neurotic character that throw hyperbole like no one's business when it came to giving pep talks at the campus and invigorating tired programmers that were ready to collapse from exhaustion to work on the next version of Windows, or implementations to Office, or XBox or whatever. For those that didn't, Bill Gates was going to focus on more important work, philanthropy, whatever; it didn't matter or seem to be that big of a deal because Microsoft had came out of nowhere and conned the best of them; both IBM and Apple when it came to developing Windows, and was a force to be reckoned with. In fact, no better time to "retire", than the moment when the stock is soaring, everyone is making millions off of their options, and Microsoft could do anything through Windows.

Now that both Google and Yahoo! have had stock that is twice that what Microsoft offered on their best day and the Open Source Movement is well underway backed by industry titans like IBM we want to see the demise of Microsoft. I am here to tell you that it may not happen any time soon; take this into consideration, when IBM was "toppled" by Microsoft and had to face the reality that their proprietary PC technology was not feasible for the public they simply fell into the shadows of the consumer market and began offering consulting services and found a niche in the enterprise instead of focusing so heavily on supercomputing. The efforts paid off, they still have over 350,000 employees and $90 billion in revenue. By contrast Microsoft has slightly over $50 billion in revenue and 70,000 employees. If Microsoft "crushed" IBM it is only because their 2 products, in home computing nonetheless, is worked on by less than a fifth of the employees that worked at IBM making up just half of what IBM's revenue is, suggesting that IBM is not as efficient. It is an ignorant perception, but then again so was the idea that IBM became irrelevant just because they don't predominate the home market anymore.

In fact the reality is that there is only so much money to be made in home computing in general, and open source has not only ate Microsoft's lunch in the enterprise, where few people notice, but is beginning to make inroads on the home front as well. Entire governments are training kids to use Linux and implementing it whenever possible, as much for political reasons as they are practical of course, but Microsoft's market is still primarily here in the States. It isn't news anymore, but the antitrust suits that dogged Microsoft in the early nineties are still ongoing in Europe, which never had as much of a convoluted relationship with the company as the United States did. Back then, the idea was to split up the company and force them to work on products independent of each other to discourage the heavy reliance that they had on each other. That didn't happen, but neither did the codependency; you can still bring down the OS by attacking Office or Internet Explorer, your printer or other peripherals can still force the computer to shut down and have you loose all your work. Vista was an embarrassment, but then again so was XP when it first came out; people tend to forget that a simple virus would shut your computer down within seconds of it being up, this was shortly after the launch of XP.

In fact until SP2 you were pretty much spinning wheels with the OS, and this is a fact that has dogged Microsoft, on any implementation of the OS for the home market, since Windows 95. Sure some OS are stable looking back on it years from now, but starting out anything that wasn't built off of the server platform was questionable; in fact, many consumers flocked to the server platforms of Microsoft's OS just to get away from the issues that plagued home users, and the primary reason that many insisted on not using it was that Microsoft wouldn't support gaming on anything but the pedestrian versions of their OS. Yet times have changed; Linux is starting to somewhat become more reliable, stability wasn't really an issue, but simply using the OS, which was often difficult to wade through was enough to turn non-techies off. But does any of what is happening with Vista, what always happens with a new Microsoft OS, enough to give Open Source enough momentum to simply "crush" Microsoft, cause disinterest in their products, and cause them to become irrelevant?

Not really; it is a great thing that Open Source is offering consumers some valid alternatives; 90% of what you can do with a PC, if not more, can be accomplished through old hardware running Linux for free, if nothing else you can "digress" to using Slackware or Debian if the user friendliness of Ubuntu turns you off. These days the lions share of computing is through the web browser anyway, so what you can't do there Open Office can replicate what Office used to do. Now there will always be urban professionals that actually run software on their PC, and a lot of them are on Mac for obvious reasons, but if Open Source picks up enough momentum there may be serious versions of the software they love that they can use, not configure, such as Photoshop or Auto CAD, or tax software. In fact these users may be the last frontier of Open Source computing, having effectively won over disaffected desktop users and the enterprise.

But does any of this suggest that Microsoft does not and will not implement whatever cash they do have to do research that can be used by corporations, not end users, in creative and sophisticated ways, such as IBM has? New companies like Google and Yahoo! fascinate us because they are but the few success stories of the dot com age, though they have amassed talent and some real power without the large reserves of cash that old school companies like Microsoft from the eighties have is interesting, but this shouldn't suggest to anyone that the older companies are going to close up shop. One of the smarter things that Ballmer has done is to keep his mouth shut about what happens at Microsoft Research; projects that get under your skin and give techies goosebumps when you consider what they are doing over there (if you can appreciate the "magic" behind these technologies). Whether or not they have the foresight to implement these technologies into computing appliances in creative ways is yet to be seen, but if nothing else it does show that Microsoft does have talented people doing brilliant things. The leadership is questionable, the real question is whether or not Microsoft has turned into the stalwart that IBM had appeared to be in the eighties; undedicated in personal computing, taking it as an afterthought failing to concern themselves with anything other than the enterprise, such seems to be the case as the future of Microsoft seems to revolve around trying to create compelling answers to other companies award winning computing appliances ...