Microsoft has been making noises recently about their new 'cloud-computing' platform, The Core (or the Mesh, as some call it). This has got me wondering: where is Microsoft heading?
At the moment, Microsoft is still by far the dominant player in the computing world and this is largely due to it's success in the operating system market. Now, as I'm sure you will have noticed, I think XP was fairly average (after a terrible start), but Vista is just awful. It really is!
The other problem now is that after using the iPhone for five months and then trying to use Windows Mobile 5 it has become clear that this OS is almost as bad. It used to be the best you could get by default because Palm had thrown their technological lead away by doing......well, nothing.
When the iPhone SDK-developed software kicks in, however, I can't think of a single reason to go back to WM5. The only reason to use it now for most business users in Exchange email and editing Office docs on the fly, but the iPhone is going to do Exchange better in June and, as for the Office editing, well here's my current problem: in my job, I frequently send and receive Excel files that are heavily macro'd and VB'd up the wazoo. Natively, the WM5 device I own can only open emailed Excel files in Pocket Excel, which means that because of the complexity of the files, you often end up with utter nonsense. Any third-party options by nature have to be running constantly and clunk-up an already underpowered OS by draining processor power. On the iPhone, received files are displayed as a kind of screen dump in Mail so, whilst you can't edit them, you can see them in full and with all the elements in place, unlike the WM5 option. This type of problem is by no means unusual when dealing with Microsoft operating systems.
So, what is left for Microsoft? It can go one of a number of ways. They can either continue along the path of bloated corporate megalith, trading for decades on their massive dominance in the legacy market and doing little in the way of innovation, or they can invest in what they have recently been very promising at: hardware and web 2.0.
Try to think of a piece of Microsoft hardware that is crappy. They make very decent PC peripherals, a technically alluring music player (albeit with a Sure Doesn't Play music Store) and an extremely innovative games console (the Wii notwithstanding). As I've posted before, they are currently doing some marvellous work in the area of internet software with their Live services and integrating them nicely with xBox 360. Web 2.0 services, allied to an all-you-can-eat data service would be an ideal replacement for Windows Mobile. But the amazing thing about all this is that they are nowhere near as successful in these areas as with even their shittiest product ever: Vista. Vista is the best-selling new OS in the history of computing. I know that many units are shifted by virtue of being pre-installed on new machines, but I can't think of a period in retail computing when more home alternatives are available. There is Mac OSX, the Eee PC and even Dell are offering Ubuntu-driven machines. Is it any wonder that when the Microsoft money-men are allocating funds for the next financial year, those services that are not raking it in fall by the attention wayside? What will become of Live Core?
I don't know how much longer Microsoft can plough on with creating poor operating systems. XP only needed to be mediocre to succeed, but now they can't even manage that. Far from wanting Microsoft to fail in their endeavours, I would like them to start their next effort from scratch (or as near as possible). Surely they can afford to support all their legacy interests separately from a new Windows platform. Many people are currently paying a premium to get XP on new machines, so there may even be a way to monetise this pursuit. As a Mac user, the thought of a new, cheaper competitor to OSX is tantalising, and Microsoft are the only company capable of it.
The sounds coming out of Redmond, however are that Windows 7 is coming sooner that you might think, which in turn means that we are probably in for more disappointment. It also means that the fair green shoots of promise in other spheres from Microsoft are likely to be overshadowed once more by yet another swollen resource-hungry Vistalike.
