Fair assessments of Microsoft and some of the things it should do moving forward are usually heavy handed with all kinds of buzzwords and negative connotations. It’s understandable I guess given that’s how you get readers to your blog and earn you Web 2.0 brownie points. So it was rather nice to see a post by Jason Hiner today over at the ZDNet blogs that wasn’t your typical big bad Microsoft type of hyperbole.
The part of Jason’s post I found interesting though was he three suggestions for Microsoft and the future of the company. I found them interesting enough I thought I would add some of my own thoughts to them as well. So let’s start with his first suggestion which is
Use its expertise and experience in software applications (including OS) to create a new breed of applications that have seamless online/offline capabilities from the Web browser
When it comes this area I think Microsoft has kind of boxed itself in to a corner because of two things. The first being Internet Explorer in that I think that, at least as of IE 7 and IE 8 Beta, their browser has become a bloated piece of software. As well because of their proprietary mindset their implementation of Add-Ons was a mistake.
It would have been a lot smarter to support the same plug-in and extension underpinning that has made Firefox plug-ins as incredibly popular as they are. Even Chrome with the installation of a version of GreaseMonkey for Chrome Greasemetal) can use the same plug-ins in the majority of cases. There are any number of advantages from doing this but primarily it would make a more unified add-on platform for the users. One that they would greatly appreciate it.
The other area is Microsoft’s investment in Silverlight and using it to bring rich Internet applications (RIA) to the browser. Granted it has been billed more as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash but when it comes to the web Adobe isn’t Its main competitor – Google is.
By concentrating on Silverlight based web applications, or ports of existing Microsoft applications, to the platform they are creating a decision point for users. By this I mean that users are having to decide whether they want to install yet another proprietary web application platform just to use a couple of web apps. Sure Silverlight might make perfect sense when it comes to things like video but for most users of web apps it’ll send them to other options.
Jason’s second point for Microsoft is
Reboot Windows Mobile and bring Bill Gates’ vision of the mobile computer to life
I couldn’t agree more. Now word is that Windows Mobile (WinMo) 6.5 will be bringing some changes to the mobile OS but no serious improvement will be seen until they release WinMo 7. It is this release that is rumored to be based on Windows 7 and potentially will see more involvement from the Zune Media Player group.
The big problem for Microsoft in this area though is the growing user base of iPhone users and now we have Google’s Android OS for mobile computing taking foothold. This isn’t even taking into account things like Symbian or even Palm’s new OS for their line of mobile phones like the upcoming Pre.
If Microsoft still wants to be considered an innovator in this space they are really going to have to crack the whip and start producing some mind changing mobile products.
For his last point Jason head’s into Microsoft’s cash cow businesses and suggests:
[Microsoft] Make its enterprise software, especially Exchange and SQL Server, highly affordable and scalable so that it can help businesses of all sizes create their own private clouds in the years ahead
This a great suggestion and while it could really cement its place in the corporate space even more that it is is I think there is an even more fundamental area that could be a real winner for the company. That area is its pricing of the Windows itself. This has always been the biggest chink in Microsoft’s armor and has drawn more fire on the company than anything else, other than Internet Explorer.
This multi-level OS version and the pricing of them really got ridiculous with Vista and unfortunately looks to do the same with Windows 7. They might be slimming down the product line of versions but I don’t believe they have gone far enough. In this day and age there is no need for the excessive number of version.
Additionally they would be smart to really consider their whole licensing scheme when it comes to home users. With more and more homes becoming multiple computer consumers Microsoft should seriously allowing for at the most two different licenses. The simplest would be the single user license which would allow the use of the OS on one computer. For anything more than that e.g.: a family multi-computer situation or a single multi-computer home, have a slightly higher license fee.
Our computing world is changing like it never has before with an ever increasing reliance on the Web and Microsoft is reaching a point where they are going to have to re-evaluate much of their business model. They would go a long way if they really started catering to the consumer market instead of treating them as a computing stepchild.
