Get Off Microsoft

As Apple eats away at Microsoft’s market share on the consumer side of PCs and mobile devices, and Google chips at Microsoft Office’s share in business, Microsoft is caught in the middle and facing a two-front war.

Windows 7supposed to be the operating system to replace Vista in three years (or less). Will Microsoft continue to be as big a threat to innovation as it was in the past?

What will change the landscape and make it possible for larger numbers of users, especially corporate users, to overcome Microsoft inertia? I’m tracking the development of software as a service, smartphones that don’t do Windows and don’t need to, Apple’s OS X that may some day run Windows XP apps, and Linux on the desktop, which is growing fast in overseas markets.

More Windows users are switching to Macs because their Windows PCs are out of date. People have finally figured out (after about a decade of it being true) that there is no penalty in switching from Windows to the Mac.

The Microsoft brand is getting pummeled overseas, in the music industry, and in the server market. Can you even estimate how much good will has been lost? Gates and Ballmer must get indigestion every morning as they scan the headlines on their pocket PCs.

This is how Microsoft gets away with “interoperability” — co-opting proven standards (like XML) and turning them into Microsoft pseudo-standards, which are then set as defaults for the program while offering the real standards as options.

If Apple’s OS X ever became seriously vulnerable to a virus or worm in the wild, as Windows is routinely vulnerable to, it would create press headlines way, way beyond what you see now.

Updates, patches, and configurations for Microsoft Windows PCs throw businesses for a loop, and slowly the IT departments of these businesses are responding. And they’re not jumping on the Windows Vista bandwagon. Herein lies a tale of two successful deployments of alternatives.

Among several Windows Vista patches released yesterday, Microsoft included one that lets iPods be disconnected without getting corrupted. This time, Microsoft blinked first and fixed the problem.

Windows XP users — have you recently been “unable to complete genuine Windows validation”? You may be a pirate — or at least Microsoft thinks you might be.