Over the past few years it is probably fair to say that on the surface Microsoft has been looking a little bit stale. Not helped by the fact that its competitors often seem to have much better marketing strategies (I’m a Mac, I’m a PC) the software giant (and they should probably try and stop people calling them that) has been getting a bad rap. Even I took a shot at them in an article after attending a rather dull partner conference in Broadbeach, Queensland last year and it was quite amusing the year before watching all the Microsoft sales people promoting Windows while watching them play with their iPhones between sessions – a practice that is now banned by Microsoft.
With all of that in mind it would be easy to summise that we’re witnessing the death of a dinosaur, that Microsoft have had their fame and glory and that it is time to pass the torch on to someone else. But interestingly, that doesn’t really seem to be happening as quickly in the nuts and bolts side of the IT world, that is, IT people are still embracing Microsoft products often more than ever before whereas competitors like Google and Apple still struggle to offer an appropriate business or sometimes even retail solution.
Lets take Google for example – Microsoft’s arch enemy. Google offer Google Docs – when Google Docs was announced there was talk amongst my peers that it wouldn’t be long before their offering surpasses Microsoft Office (and for the Chicken Little’s of this world, all of us IT guys would be out of a job as a consequence of that) but Google Docs has had a number of quite serious commercial setbacks. For one thing, there is no offline version of Google Docs. So imagine if you’re working on a crucial email or spreadsheet and you lose Internet – not an atypical scenario, for many of us this happens regularly especially if you’re a traveller. Well, the problem is you’ll need to wait until your Internet returns before you can access your account and get back to work. And that’s exactly what happened recently in a major way where many businesses couldn’t access Gmail, Google’s answer to Microsoft Exchange, went offline for about a week last month impacting companies all over the world. Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft’s hosted Exchange (BPOS) has had similar outages, perhaps not for as long, but Microsoft are well entrenched into installing software on the desktop which means documents and emails are available locally as well.
Couple the above with the fact that users still enjoy the familiarity of products they have been trained on and using for many years, Google Docs hasn’t quite had the appeal just yet. Microsoft have the battle scars of mail applications such as Outlook, Outlook Express and the underlying Exchange platform and Google is still teething in this area.
Recently Microsoft have launched a beta of Office 360 which is a totally cloud based version of Microsoft Office. They haven’t been too cocky, just quietly getting people to have a play and see how it goes – what they have going for them is the online/offline ability to switch between Office and Office 360 and this will hurt Google especially if the pricing structure isn’t too restrictive.
Every time I see an iPad or a Macbook.. I want one. In fact, I’ve bought every edition of the iPhone and will probably end up with an iPad 2 simply because I like to keep my hands on all the technologies my clients are likely to end up with – but the reality is that Apple haven’t competed with Microsoft on the desktop. When Microsoft Vista was launched it was a bloody disaster – I can’t tell you how frustrating it was from an IT support perspective, let alone from those companies who attempted to go down the Vista path. The timing was terrible, Apple went for the jugular and launched scathing attacks against Microsoft belittling their operating system. Fast forward to Windows 7 and Microsoft have bounced back. The platform has been fast, secure and relatively free of its predecessors blue screens of death that we’ve all become accustomed to. Meanwhile, cracks are starting to appear in the Apple world – I can tell you as an avid iPad user my iPad freezes a lot, as does my iPhone – and having owned a Macbook for some time alongside my PC I can tell you that the error message might be different, the colour of the “death screen” may have changed but many of the problems are the same.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that Microsoft appeared to have hung back in the cloud side of things. We’ve seen Facebook revolutionise social media, and we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of apps appear as totally online experiences. Meanwhile though, Microsoft have quietly released products that just seem to work solidly and add real value to people. Take for example Windows Live Skydrive, a cloud based online storage solution. Its not gimmicky and it certainly won’t change the world, but it actually works really well and gives users 25GB of free storage which is a good alternative to keeping your critical files, photos or videos sitting on your computer without a backup. On the subject of Facebook, rather than try and compete, they’ve done a deal to integrate their Bing search engine into Facebook – it won’t beat Google but it’s a good strategic play on both Facebook and Microsoft’s part.
The thing that I’m seeing is that Microsoft has stopped trying to be all things to all people. Perhaps they’ve recognised that the entire marketplace has changed (and lets not forget who pushed and developed that marketplace in the first instance) and are now focusing on solid, core offerings that their competitors simply can’t do because they don’t yet have the experience. Their products integrate together more than ever before such as Sharepoint (document management), CRM, Microsoft Office and the aforementioned Microsoft Exchange.
There is an article on ZDNet today outlining what they believe to be all of Microsoft’s past failures – the interesting thing is that most of those products have just reached their used by dates, many of them made good money at the time but aren’t all that useful anymore – I don’t think anybody could see that as poor business practice.
Speaking strictly from my role as a CEO of an IT support firm, I can’t see where Microsoft doesn’t play a role in the future of the enterprise. While we may see many applications superseded in the cloud by new companies offering an alternative, Microsoft have a strong core platform that they are quietly moving into the cloud but that doesn’t really change the dynamic too much from a business perspective. In our experience most businesses from 5-25 employees run on Microsoft’s Small Business Server – they’re now at the stage where that type of software titled SBS Azure can run a small company but from a data centre or the cloud. This means most companies can still continue to run on a standard Microsoft network and still gain the benefits and reduce business risk by shifting to the cloud. We’re just not seeing that all in one business solution from Apple and I think in the true sense of the phrase, we’d be comparing Apple’s with oranges to even try.
On the subject of cloud, we also need to remember that Microsoft – again the quiet achiever – have been building the worlds largest data centers which puts them as essentially the new landlords of the world granted, alongside Apple, Amazon and Google.
By no means am I a Microsoft sympathiser. Their licensing model sucks, their partner program often feels like a waste of time and some of their software just plain doesn’t work well – but the same cracks are starting to appear in the competition as well. Perhaps once you become a “software giant” you become just like all the other software giants.
What I think we’re seeing is a more cautious approach from Microsoft. In Jim Collin’s book Good to Great this would be described as their hedgehog concept. They’ve begun to cull the products that don’t have any market appeal and replace them with solid, working solutions. I personally do not think we are seeing the death of Microsoft but rather a complete reengineering of their market strategy and I wouldn’t count them out for a long time yet.
