Get Off Microsoft

Good news! Competition has returned to the industry. I can go on to better topics now. Thanks for all the fish!

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More Windows users are switching to Macs because their Windows PCs are out of date.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.

Microsoft’s shakedown turned Novell into a Microsoft partner with SuSE Linux; now it has turned Xandros into a partner as well. Microsoft made them a deal they couldn’t refuse. Like garbage hauling contractors in the Northeast Jersey of The Sopranos, Xandros and Novell have nothing to lose by paying tribute to Microsoft. Linux is thriving in the shadow of Microsoft’s cold war.

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.

So far there have been no reports of trouble with the iTunes 7.1 update, other than Vista problems. The new iTunes version 7.1.1., released last week, which packs a lot of new features, fixes some of these problems, but not all.