nerd@metrocat.org

A World Without Microsoft

The recent announcement that the WinFS project is dead has sparked a lot of commentary. One of the more insightful pieces is Microsoft Buries Cairo, Microsoft Monitor. I can still remember receiving a briefing on Cairo while I was working in Atlanta — to hear the Microsoft evangelist tell it, the Cairo “file” system (or object system) was going to revolutionise software development. That was the whole gist of Cairo, but it never came to fruition.

Now we have the WinFS — a relational “file” system built upon Microsoft’s SQL Server technology. Or rather, we don’t. WinFS is dead.

Wilcox suggests that Microsoft’s competitors jump on the opportunity to sow Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (a classic Microsoft tactic) regarding Microsoft’s ability to deliver on its promises. This prompted my wife to ask, “What happens if Microsoft doesn’t ship the next version of Windows?” What happens, indeed. First, I don’t think it’s actually possible that Microsoft would fail to deliver Vista. Granted, I didn’t think it would take them six years to deliver it, but I think at this point, they’ll start cutting features until they have something — anything — to ship. But it’s a very valid question: where are the competitors that should be taking advantage of this huge misstep?

Well, who are Microsoft’s competitors in the desktop operating system market? I mean really.

What about Linux?

There simply isn’t a Linux distribution that’s actually ready for the desktop. Oh, I don’t mean the distributions aren’t stable or that they don’t ship with interesting applications. But for all the effort that folks like Ubuntu put into it, there’s just no polish and consistency. Say what you want about Microsoft’s UI, but applications that follow the rules look consistent. On Linux there’s at least three major widget libraries and they all look slightly different. RedHat and Ubuntu have done a good job of making the different kits look mostly alike.

But visual consistency isn’t the big problem facing Linux. The real problem is that it doesn’t run Microsoft Office. There’s Open Office, AbiWord and several others, but none of them is Office. That really matters to companies. There’s a lot of emotional investment tied up in Microsoft Office. The CIO and IT staff probably doesn’t care what the users run on their desktops (probably) but the actual users are comfortable with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. They don’t want to change.

So the truth is, it doesn’t matter how good Open Office or AbiWord actually is. Neither application is Microsoft Office.

What about Mac OS X?

While I’d like to think that Microsoft’s continued troubles is a great opportunity for Apple to carve a chunk out of Windows’ market share for Mac OS X, I don’t think it will. Oh, don’t get me wrong: if Apple has competent corporate sales reps, they’ll be starting to instil doubt in the minds of the CIO and IT staff who might be customers for Apple hardware. Part of the message that Apple can offer is that in addition to playing well in a Windows network, Mac OS X can run Microsoft Office. And now, with the Intel Core Duo-based Macintosh, you can run legacy Windows applications via Parallels or whatever product Apple ships with Leopard. This is a really compelling message, but it has one significant flaw: Apple isn’t really trying to sell Mac OS X, it’s trying to sell Macintosh hardware.

Now, I firmly believe that (recent) Macintosh hardware is the best money can buy, but it’s one thing for a CIO to consider deploying a new operating system across his enterprise and an entirely different thing to consider purchasing new hardware. Most organisations purchase their hardware on some sort of schedule, whether a five year depreciation-based schedule or three year functional obsolescence schedule (or one to two year for developers). So those organisations can’t roll out Mac OS X no matter how much they (presumably) want to.

Apple can crack this nut by selling their hardware running Windows XP. Imagine the following scenario:

Fearing that Microsoft is on a downward spiral, Foobar Corp agrees to replace its Dell Craptacular 3000s with clean, white iMacs running Windows XP on Intel Core Duos. Then in 2009 or 2010 when the last Dell is unceremoniously tossed on the dung heap (where they all belong), the CIO announces that the company will transition all machines from Windows XP (they never bothered with Vista AKA Windows XP Service Pack 3) to Mac OS X. Granted there will be a mild uproar, but quite probably many of the iMacs have already made the transition, and the rest will be assuaged by the presence of Microsoft Office running on OS X.

Do I really think this will happen? Maybe in a few companies. Especially in companies where the CIO personally likes Macintosh hardware better than the boring beige boxes offered by the likes of Dell, Gateway, HP and others. But it really won’t happen large scale. Why? Partly because I don’t think Steve Jobs would sell an iMac running Windows. Not an iMac that can run Windows, which he already sells. But an iMac that starts up out of the box and boots directly into Windows XP.

So who?

The answer to my wife’s question, “What happens if Microsoft doesn’t ship the next version of Windows?” is nothing happens. At the moment in the operating system market, the only competitor to Windows Vista is Windows XP. This is the same problem Microsoft faces with the upcoming version of Office: fragmentation. There will be a tremendous number of companies for whom updating to Vista just isn’t worth the effort. There just isn’t enough in Vista to make the transition attractive.

Microsoft Office also suffers from fragmentation, but the next version of Office will be sporting a radically different UI that the designers claim will dramatically improve the usability of the applications. This is both good and bad, but it is definitely bold. And there’s nothing bold about Vista.

If I were the type to take cheap shots, I might say there’s nothing new in Vista.