In some ways it is humorous, but as someone who spends much of their time watching and writing about Microsoft it can also be frustrating to always feel like one is fighting an uphill battle in trying to provide an objective viewpoint about the company and products.
On one hand you have a company that seems bent on becoming a quaint footnote in computing history while living as long as it can on the reputation of a software paradigm that is showing its age. Then on the other hand we have a company that spends more money on R&D than the GDP of many small countries. It is a company that employs some of the smartest people in the world that are trying to bring the next generation of computing to reality.
And yet if you look around the tech blogosphere the majority of time Microsoft is either totally ignored, marginalized or even treated to really bad movie analogies. In the same breath companies like Apple are praised to the max even as it continually proves that its interests are more important that the consumer’s. That isn’t to say Apple, or even services like Facebook, doesn’t deserve positive treatment but there is a total disconnect it seems when it comes to the contributions that Microsoft makes.
There seems to be this common assumption that the Microsoft we see today is the same company we will see 10 or 15 years from now. This extends to the unfounded belief that Windows will continue on indefinitely into the future without any any real changes to the desktop metaphor or change in philosophy.
As well, thanks to tech pundits; who probably weren’t out of diapers yet at the time that we first began to hear about something called Windows that was more than just s a graphical stub for programs like Pagemaker or Corel Draw, there is this mind-numbing belief that Microsoft has stolen every idea that it has used in creating its software. Typically the argument being used is that Apple was the originator of our current graphical user interface with the briefest of nods to Xerox’s PARC project and that Microsoft couldn’t come up with an original idea on its own.
It’s a cute fantasy but if truth be known anyone who knows their computer history much of what Windows is, came out of the battle with IBM and OS/2 and both IBM and Microsoft saw the value of what Apple had done and as a result utilized the ideology in their own offerings.
The interesting thing though is the commonly accepted belief that Microsoft steals or borrows from everyone else rather than innovate on their own. The fact of the matter is that the technology we are using today is all based around the borrowing of ideas – everything is stolen at some point. Apple borrowed from PARC and Microsoft borrowed from them all.
Who cares – it happens every single day in our tech world. There is actually very little original innovation going on. It is all just a matter of companies trying to build a better copy or version of the original mouse trap. This is something we see daily even in the software and web world. Everyone is trying to mimic Facebook, copy Twitter or make a better Foursquare and no-one complains. Yet Microsoft is a big criminal for developing and marketing Windows.
Another sign where these inane movie analogy using tech pundits show their lack of understanding is through their assumption that one of the largest and wealthiest tech companies isn’t planning for the future and that we will be using Windows forever because they are too afraid to innovate or change. Perhaps they have forgotten the biggest shift a tech company has ever made as Microsoft moved from a DOS based world into a Windows based one amid cries of the company’s imminent death because of the change.
Microsoft has prove before that when the time comes they can make those major shifts and not look back. Anyone who thinks that the company hasn’t been planning for the future only show the rest of us just how bad their myopia is. They obviously don’t pay attention to all of the tech world or they would know about things like MinWin, or Singularity, or Midori, or Strata. All of which are part of Microsoft looking for that next operating system.
I realize that it is all the rage to point at things like the Kin or even past mistakes like the SPOT watch and suggest that Microsoft doesn’t have a clue anymore. The only problem with that silliness is that you are forgetting about things like Kinect which will have an incredible effect well beyond just the Xbox. Then there is Azure which might be more enterprise oriented but it shows that Microsoft was into the cloud long before it became the newest buzzword.
As my good friend Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins wrote today regarding Azure:
The point is that Microsoft has been on top of their long term product vision for quite some time now – years, in fact – and has shown amazing prescience on where the enterprise market is headed.
If anyone realizes that the Windows we know of today is going to go away it is Microsoft; but to assume that they aren’t planning or developing its successor is an idiot pure an simple. I’m not suggesting that Microsoft will have the next major operating system or that it will automatically be successful – only a moron would suggest that – but I do know that to suggest that Microsoft is out of any game, now or in the future, is extremely shortsighted.
Note: no bad movie analogies were hurt or killed in the writing of this post.
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