Whither Microsoft?

By Rhodo Zeb. Filed in Tech/IT |
Tags: IT, software

Going in a different direction, I would like to focus on the operating system wars of the future. As an Ubuntu user, I am keen to see when and how Linux can take some market share away from Microsoft. And I suppose that statement assumes that this trend is where we are going, however slowly.

Look, you can argue that the status quo is sustainable, but MS has never made a secure product. Never. They have always chosen more features by default, turned on by default. They have always chosen more code laid on top to cripple, grab info, and try to steer (or block) the user, nearly at every turn.

Mac people, don’t even talk. Yeah, the products are cool. But they are a bit player in the market, and always will be. Apple made a critical error in the beginning: they chose the higher pricing point, and thereby the lost the war. Its that simple.

I know because I started out on Macs, which we got, used, through some hookup my folks had. But when it got time for me to buy my own, the die had been cast: I needed to submit documents in formats geared towards the PC, and the PCs were cheaper, anyway! kthnxbai.

Microsoft is also fun to watch for all the dumb things they do. Remember when they refused to acknowledge a (major, of course, this is Microsoft we are talking about here) security flaw that was found by some fan-boys? And then a week later, of course, they totally reversed course. Now just the other day their marketing department didn’t coordinate well and handed out a dead link. M$: You know you love to hate them.

Back in February I read an interesting article by Eric Krangel: Microsoft Terrified Companies Won’t Upgrade To Windows 7:

The biggest problem for Microsoft over the next 12-18 months is whether enterprise customers, a whopping 71% of whom never upgraded off Windows XP, will embrace the upcoming Windows 7, or whether they’ll stick it out with XP for years to come.

Of course, Windows is doing its best to cut support for XP as short as possible, to force everyone to move on.

The problem is that Windows is only worthwhile if it is the standard. If half the people are on XP and the other half are on Windows 7, then there are many compatibility problems. These, of course, are Microsoft’s own creation, but nonetheless make Windows less useful overall, and more troublesome. I played with an upgraded Office product on a older computer I had, and there were tons of problems between that and a normal XP system with the standard Office over here, forgot which one it is. Office 2003 or whatever.

Now you could go back to that part about problems of their own creation, but hey, in for one, in for all. Oops:

…new data first obtained by InformationWeek indicates that only a small percentage of businesses plan to migrate to Windows 7 in its first year of availability.

Economic concerns and worries about compatibility — the bugbear that doomed Vista in the corporate market — will keep Windows 7 on the shelf for all but a handful of enterprises until at least 12 months after the OS becomes available later this year or early next, depending on Microsoft’s release schedule.

[A] whopping 83% of enterprises plan to skip the OS in its first year. While the business market typically tends toward caution when it comes to new products, the figure is nonetheless surprising given that almost no large companies migrated to Vista and as a result most have been using XP much longer than planned.

Fewer than half of the IT pros surveyed, 42%, said their organizations planned to deploy Windows 7 within 12 to 24 months of release, 24% said they would wait 24 to 36 months, and 17% said they would wait more than 36 months to migrate to Windows 7.

Windows is, of course, a long time powerhouse. And many a naysayer will be left in the dust by the time the stream finally runs out. But I do wonder how Windows 7 will do. The problem is that Windows is not a monopoly any more, and their business model is unsustainable in a competitive market. When it was a de facto monopoly they could get away with the poor quality, and they had their chance to provide a really competitive product for the market. They just failed to do so.

Back to another article on SAI:

Companies’ biggest gripe: Software compatibility. While the Vista-to-7 upgrade path is fairly painless — as the two versions of Windows share a lot of code — going from XP to 7 is difficult and time-consuming. It could easily be the biggest IT initiative of the year for many companies that make the upgrade. So this is something Microsoft should aim to make less painful.

Ok, so companies are going to need some key staff to see their organizations through this ordeal. Right? Ummm:

Eighty-one percent of businesses said that they are scaling back their hiring of information-technology pros, according to a survey of 1,900 HR execs and recruiters to be released Monday by job Web site Dice.com. The number is up slightly from a similar survey in November, when 73% of respondents said that they were scaling back hiring.

Meanwhile, 43% of businesses said that they thought it was likely they would lay off IT staff over the next six months, down slightly from the 48% who thought layoffs were likely in November.

Hmm. Good luck with that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 00:29 and is filed under Tech/IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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