[LINK] Microsoft: The existence of alternatives changes everything

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Microsoft: The existence of alternatives changes everything
Michael Parsons
ZDNet UK
April 15, 2004, 15:50 BST
http://comment.zdnet.co.uk/other/0,39020682,39152240,00.htm 

What's happening to Microsoft? Business Week calls it a midlife crisis, but
what if the world has simply moved on?

The announcement that US regulators want to prod Microsoft to share more
information with its partners underlines how things have changed for the
software giant.

I remember the siege mentality in Silicon Valley during the first Microsoft
trial. The company's browser bundle and its battle with Netscape seemed to
make competing against such a dominant, cash-rich rival almost impossible.
Who was going to be next? It became a cliché to talk of Silicon Valley
venture capitalists asking "the Microsoft question" - how will your new
technology fit into the Microsoft ecosystem, given the impossibility of
fighting City Hall and taking on Redmond directly?

People genuinely questioned whether it was going to be fun doing technology
anymore, given Microsoft's ability to provide a solid me-too in any market
it wished to enter. Why innovate if you were going to end up competing
against a vanilla version from Microsoft with far more marketing muscle and
a huge Windows installed base? The slap on the wrist that Microsoft
received after the Department of Justice found against it seemed to confirm
all this doom and gloom. Microsoft had won.

It doesn't feel like that now. The aftermath of Microsoft's second trial in
Europe sees Microsoft not as triumphant monopolist but as beleaguered
incumbent. The company didn't expect to lose this suit, but it did, and it
now faces a long and distracting appeals process. It is throwing around
millions of dollars to end patent disputes with its bitterest foes. It says
it has changed. It wants to come in from the cold. It's fed up with being
treated like a bully. I asked the incoming head of Microsoft UK if there
was one thing that he'd regretted in his eight years with the company. He
replied at once: "The Department of Justice trial. We learned a lot from
that."

Business Week frames Microsoft's position as a rite of passage, with a
cover story that asks whether Microsoft can get over its midlife crisis.
But that doesn't feel right to me. This isn't a rite of passage. It's a
different world, and one in which Microsoft's familiar moves look
increasingly out of place. Several incidents during the last two weeks have
left me with a nagging feeling that the game really has moved on.

Item One: We don't want to buy software

This week's launch in Europe of Salesforce.com's latest software upgrade
provided one example of how Web technology can simply bypass Microsoft's
monopoly. The company's logo is a red circle with a line through it over
the word software -- as in, "no software here". Its marketing capitalises
on the pent-up frustration and irritation with complex software by offering
a piped CRM application through a Web browser as a service for a monthly
fee -- with a 30-day free trial. You can pay over the phone with your
credit card, and no salesman will call. If your salespeople have Web
browsers, it's pretty much deployed.

Founder Marc Benioff is an ex-Oracle man, so it's not surprising that there
is no love lost between Microsoft and Salesforce.com, but it seemed to me
that the company's executives had in their eyes the gleam of people who
know they're riding the next wave -- an anti-software wave. Salesforce.com
is software for people who don't want to deal with a software company --
with licences, with IT departments, with training, with the whole mess. As
one user told me, "I need the service. I don't need to own the software."
The existence of alternatives changes everything.

Item Two: We know there's better software out there

The second incident was the announcement of Google's Gmail. On the last day
of March, I was at my desk trying to find a document in one of the 600
messages in my Microsoft Outlook inbox. I watched the tragic sight of
Microsoft's embarrassing puppy skipping away while the search engine
wheezed its way through my files. The horrid little cartoon seemed a
painful attempt to substitute style for substance. The search was slow and
I couldn't find what I was looking for. Then I went to Google and found an
excellent helper application, the Nelson Email Organizer, which allows me
to do wickedly fast searches in Outlook. Can someone please explain to me
how Google can search billions of pages on the Web more effectively than
Microsoft can search my 600 e-mails? Eerily, the next day Google announced
an email service that, among other things, promised me the ability to use
Google to search my mail. The existence of alternatives changes everything.

Item three: We want to use it, not hug it

I had two separate meetings with Microsoft product managers. They were
talking about very different products -- one on the desktop, one for
business users -- but they shared a passionate love for the technology that
they were helping to create. Both spoke with incredible focus and
intelligence about the existing feature sets of their products and outlined
complex roadmaps for the future development of those products, in once case
mapping out the vision until 2013. Both spoke with remarkable fluency and
concentration about the intricate details of small user interface choices,
and the minor incremental benefits that they hoped to include in future
versions of their applications. Both were extremely intelligent about what
they did. To me, they were channelling the geeky
computer-who-wore-tennis-shoes charm of the early Bill Gates; super super
smart and super super passionate about doing really cool software.

As I listened to them riff enthusiastically about the details of the
software that they described, I thought: it's true. They really do love
software. That's the problem. Most users will not use a fraction of the
features with which they're so entranced. They just want it to be simple,
and to work, and do one thing well. Like Google. That's not Microsoft's
strong point. The game has moved on.

-- 
Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other
alternatives
-- Abba Eban

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at austarmetro.com.au