Windows Looks Bad
Tim Bray's second, very short notice, prediction for 2008 is that Windows is going to "look bad". It's probably a good prediction - Vista simply didn't do enough to make Windows competitive for the next 3 years or so they'll take to get the next release out. Obviously Windows isn't going to disappear but there is already a strong trend towards alternate platforms, mostly OS X, which is very likely to increase over the next 12 months. Even my wife has become an Apple evangelist (more so than me) ever since she got my old powerbook to use in front of the couch. It seems the in-laws will be making the switch in the next year as well.
In the anti-trust trial, I seem to recall it being ruled that Apple and Linux were not viable competitors for Windows and thus Microsoft held a monopoly. I probably wouldn't go so far as to say that's no longer true, but it's certainly less clear cut.
As Tim says:
Microsoft’s continuing extraction of monopoly rents is dependent, near as I can tell, on just two things:
- MS Office staying good enough that people don’t mind paying the fearful Windows tax that goes with it. Except for, Office runs better on OS X than on Windows.
- The Exchange/Outlook lock-in. This seems the big one to me.
If Office 2008 (the OS X Office update to be released Jan 15) can read and write Microsoft's new force-you-to-upgrade document format natively1, I think point 1 will be well and truly taken care of - at least until Microsoft break the format again. The current Office for Mac is painful because it runs in Rosetta so it just isn't as snappy as it should be, particularly if you have a number of other apps using a lot of memory.
The second one is going to get very interesting. I don't rate Google any chance of knocking off Office - Google Docs and Spreadsheets is way too primitive and buggy - but their flagship AJAX app is GMail and it's really good. With IMAP support now available, all that's missing is a good syndication system for Google Calendar. There's a lot of work to be done, but if Google can bring it's calendar offering up to par with GMail, we should see it starting to gain significant traction by years end.
What I find interesting in this, is that there's little indication that AJAX is going to take over, it's the combination of AJAX, desktop applications and open protocols to access and synchronize data that makes it all work. In other words, if the major trends of 2007 all came together, you'd really have something.
1 - and given the lack of uproar from the peanut gallery, er blogs, I assume it does↩
January 4th, 2008 at 4:51 am
MS just announced that upcoming Office SP3 will disable opening documents stored in some old formats. That might be a triggering event for people to jump the boat.
January 4th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
There are a few factors at stake here, as I see them:
1. For many businesses, XP and the Office 2003 app set works “well enough” to carry them into the medium-to-long term quite effectively. Businesses for the most part don’t need or want to upgrade per sé; as a rule most upgrades in business terms are driven by support lifecycles rather than product lifecycles, upgrading only when the vendor/s give them no choice in the matter.
Moreover, just as NT4 wasn’t really worth using until Service Pack 3 came out (but ended up being more acceptable than, say, Windows Me), Vista’s looking like a long way from being really business ready. As an employee of a fairly heavy Microsoft shop, I can say that we’re fairly worried about the impact of any upgrade to any Microsoft products past about Office 2003/Windows XP: once you start down that slope you’re looking at some fairly major hardware & software upgrades, many of which seem best suited to upgrade-by-forklift. With a team of five IT staff in an organisation of several hundred, forklift upgrades aren’t really something we can swallow. However, if we are forced to consider doing so, we’ll likely also consider non-Microsoft alternatives at that point.
2. Exchange sync is a big issue for many companies.
IMAP solves only part of the issue; solid calendar & contacts integration is something that many people find it hard to live without… and DAV with ICS files seems to somewhat miss the point for those types, even if functionally it does all of what it needs to for the most-affected users. Frankly, there are few integrated PIM systems out there, and Exchange happens to be one of the better ones; businesses as a rule seem to think they need an integrated PIM system. Mine employer does, at least, and I’m only thankful they didn’t pick Lotus Notes. :-)
3. Other business-centric and Windows-only applications such as MS Project, SAP etc are very well entrenched.
Yes, I know better than most that there are usually very good alternatives to these applications on other platforms — I’ve even used a few of them! However, for the same reason that many businesses would only consider going to MS Office:mac if they switched away from XP and MS Office 2003/2007, many businesses would equally only consider form-and-function-and-filetype compatible equivalents… which Microsoft hasn’t bothered to produce as yet. Whether or not they’re looking at it wrong is largely irrelevant in their view; in their largely reptilian minds they’re comfortable with what they “know,” and they “know” apps that come from the big players. Maybe the number of such apps will change should businesses start buying from alternative platform vendors, although it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
For my money, I’m betting on:
(a) many businesses continuing to hang onto XP/2003 for the time being, perhaps upgrading a handful of their platforms to the new systems when absolutely required;
(b) Microsoft continuing to attempt to foist Vista on users, but perhaps extending the XP support lifecycle just as they did for NT if only at “the last minute”; and
(c) businesses *eventually* (say, 2010/11 or thereabouts) moving to Vista and Server 2008 in whatever form they’re then available i.e. Service Pack 3, Vista++, or so. I don’t see altogether too many businesses leaving the devil-they-know in the form of MS, even if as techies we can’t necessarily see a reason not to.
Microsoft have the advantage of incumbency, and the knowledge that many large businesses are risk-averse, with IT managers who see changes in platform or supplier as risky — even if that’s effectively what the incumbent is doing by stealth. This is particularly so when one of the alternate vendors has a bit of a reputation for changing architecture and so on in fairly major ways every so often… again, whether or not that matters is irrelevant, since it’s all about perception.
Finally, Very Similar Noises were made when both Windows NT and 2000 came out primarily due to application compatibility with prior releases, and this fandangled thing called NTLM and then Active Directory meaning forklift upgrades for true effectiveness (I remember trying to make WFW 3.11 work nicely with NTLM. Ouch; Novell integration was easier).
As a result of business resistance, NT4 ended up being supported for a decade, and few if any Windows users made major jumps to something that wasn’t made by Microsoft. I have every reason to believe it’ll happen again when it comes to XP/2003, since the feature gap between 2000 and the 2003 OSes is relatively small, and most current users of Windows 2000 can move up one level without too much compatibility pain — at least compared with the jump to Vista.
If you like, Microsoft may also be a little complacent about how well or otherwise they need to treat their users; it might be that they’re treating their users worse than they did last time around (or we have very poor memories). If so, then it’s a gamble that may well pay off… for now.