I’ve waited for a little while to post about the annoucement that Bill Gates made that he is to take a back seat at Microsoft. Under the direction of Bill and Steve Microsoft have become the worlds biggest software company and one of the world’s biggest companies in any marketplace. Their growth is still primarily in infrastructure and this is a well defended area. Windows both desktop and server version has become bigger and now does more than ever. They’ve made inroads into consumer electronics too and have been successful with the Xbox.
The biggest area of change has been in Internet services. MSN has been popular but has been overtaken and overshadowed by Yahoo! and Google. A whole raft of start-ups with an exit strategy of ‘be bought by someone bigger than me’ have come along and been hoovered up by the likes of Google. Microsoft continues in this area with Windows Live. Using the Windows brand and moving it into the web services space. It’s a sensible business model. Will it work though?
Ray Ozzie, the heir to the throne of Chief Software Architect and the Scion referred to in the title of this post, has been tasked with really taking Microsoft into the services era. His first messages posted via his blog have generally eluded to putting classic thick client technology into browser applications. Cut and paste text in a web page without the need of the browser or operating system’s own cut and paste feature. Why? Is the browser on a PC no longer relevant? Why reproduce simple operating system functionality in a web application? How long are we going to rely on the browser as our main interface to the web? How long are we still going have Back and Forward buttons? How long will we expose URL’s to the user as a method of finding a web site and navigating it? There has been quite a lot of discussion about whether Windows will be delivered via the web in the future. If it is how do I interact with it? It wont need to be via a PC running an operating system because the operating system comes via the web anyway, or atleast the functionality does. It begs the question ‘what is an operating system going to do for me in future?’. Surely the whole raft of features in Windows Vista wont be delivered over the web? I suppose Citrix would argue differently. But why do it? Why move out of the desktop operating system market?
Software as a service provides greater control over the licensing of software. Microsoft lose hundreds of millions of dolars worth of revenues [I mean they're a big company, but can you imagine how big they'd really be if everyone in the world did actually pay for their software and a great proportion of it wasn't bootlegged?] It provides control, it monetises everything and means you can charge users for what they use rather than having a base license cost. Interesting that cycles per second costing existed in a mainframe world and companies like HP are going back to this model with on-demand CPU. The IT world appears to have woken up to the pay-as-you go model where the telecoms industry has begun to move away from it. Does utility computing mean having a meter in your house for how much software you use? Probably not, but being billed for what you use would dramatically change the cost and revenue model for software companies. I’d probably use Notepad more often if it was cheaper for me to use per hour than Word.
Anyway, so the Lich is Bill Gates. I don’t mean this is a bad way but he seeks to gain immortiality through transcending the mortal world that is IT through his philanthropy (rather than a phylactary). Bob Geldof will be remembered for his Live Aid work rather than not remembering why he doesn’t like Mondays. Bill stays as Chairman and will clearly have a consultative role in the direction of the company. I’m sure this influence will live on. But will this be the end of the desktop PC era, just as Bill helped usher the end of the Mainframe era? I don’t think so. The desktop in some shape or form is here to stay. It doesn’t make practical business sense for hardware manufacturers to reduce the number of processors in the world. Until we have data centres on the Moon that wirelessly connect to us on Earth we’ll have desktops. Or maybe settops.
Steve Ballmer’s job is to get the money. Initatives such as Genuine Windows Advantage, the ‘lite’ version of Windows offered in Asia to combat software piracy and further sweating of the desktop assets have proven to be great for Microsoft to get the money that is oweing to them. Sweating assets means realising the investment placed in Windows Vista and the Office suite. That investment has been billions of dollars over many years. It’s defensible turf and Microsoft have succeeded many times in defending it. Mac OS, Netscape, Linux have all been wannabes that have tried and have failed.
So where will the great Oz steer the company? He’s clearly a fan of the merge of desktop software and the Web. Groove (a product I followed for some time before Microsoft bought the company) used the strength of the Web to provide a platform for collaboration but paid heed to the interface power needed in a desktop application. It also nodded towards the requirement that the network would not necessarily be always there. You still need offline.
Until Web access is completely ubiquitous and genuinely always on - meaning I can always access it from everywhere consistently, with guaranteed connectivity and performance - how can I use a completely Web delivered application? Just as the invention of the PC drove the need for software for it the invention of the Web is driving the need for software for it. It’s just that at the moment completely Web delivered applications don’t cut it.
So just who is the wardrobe then referred to in the title you may ask? Well it’s not so much who as what. The wardrobe represents the things inside Microsoft’s cupboard of secrets. Difficult to see what they will do. Google are trying to drive the market into a place where Web delivered applications are the norm. That’s paradigm shift stuff. Well maybe the equivalent of putting a VT220 terminal inside everyone’s home. Clearly Microsoft are going to respond. They’ve got a big warchest to spend. Yahoo?
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[...] Offering applications that work in an online and offline capacity is essential and is the natural evolution of office productivity applications. The excellent Read/Write Web has recently covered this area in it’s article “Elephants and Evolution - How the Landscape is Changing for Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe“. In the article John Milan explains that it’s not enough for applications to exists exclusively on the desktop or exclusively on the Web. They must be hybrid applications. Some the follow up comments pose interesting parallels with concepts that have gone before. One person comments that this is merely client / server. My own comment highlights what I think about this area in so far as to say that tools such as Lotus Domino were aiming to cover this space for the corporate marketplace many moons ago. And when you track the evolution of one person instrumental in that vision and it’s technology, Ray Ozzie, you quickly spot who has the potential to do very well in this area. Ray Ozzie is now Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, he joined through the acquisition of his company Groove Networks who produced a collaboration tool that operates both online and offline. A previous post of mine captured some of my ideas of what I think the departure of Gates as head of Microsoft’s software direction and the introduction of Ozzie might elude to. Software as a Service, being the supposed future of application delivery, still needs an interface. As Milan’s article goes on to say: Who will the winners be? To borrow a catchphrase, “Just follow the data.” The key for success will be how easily data can be identified, distributed and synchronized. Soon enough it will be immaterial where your event or task originated. Instead, what will matter is that your data being everywhere and in sync. [...]