MS hits the big three-o

Microsoft has been called 'a wonder of the modern age', but three decades on from its inception just how wondrous is the company?

Drum roll, please; cue applause: Microsoft Corporation is now 30 years old. It has not always been an easy road, but one half of the founding team, and current chairman, Bill Gates is now quite comfortably the world's richest human, while his onetime/sometime buddy Steve Jobs is not far behind as CEO of Apple Computer.

If you were to graph people's attitudes to MS, you would probably come up with a very narrow, spiked parabola. At either end would be the hardcore fringe, who either love or loathe the company, and clustered around the centre, the vast majority, who feel some degree of positive or negative indifference depending on how well their system is working on any given day.

This is highly significant. Even with an estimated 90 percent of the world's personal computers running on some flavour of Microsoft operating system, probably only a small fraction of people actually consciously choose the company's products. The bulk simply opt for what is most readily available. But exactly how reliable are Microsoft's wares?

Put it this way, if MS were a vehicle manufacturer, the majority of us would be road kill long since. The Millennium Edition of Windows is a classic example. This much-hyped package was so congenitally flawed that it was quietly taken off life support and left to its fate. Microsoft's great strength lies in defending the dominant position it achieved by being first to market with a then highly promising OS.

Bill and his people are in fact so excellent at this that the US Department of Justice was moved to bring an anti-trust suit in the mid-90s. Here again Microsoft showed the depths of its resourcefulness, deflecting the department's efforts to split it asunder — although the subsequent billions of dollars in fines and lawsuit payouts had to hurt (as did the more recent EU and South Korean penalties).

However, where the US government failed to have its way, the market may finally apply the whip. The most prominent examples of this are the current success of the Firefox Web browser and the improving fortunes of the Linux OS, both open-source projects. Firefox has definitely shaken things up — simply by offering substantially better security and functionality than MS's oft-roasted Internet Explorer. Go figure.

Linux has been around for much longer but until recently has not attracted much attention outside the geekosphere. This looks set to change, however, thanks to backing from IBM and Red Hat, and also government groups in several countries, including, yes, Japan. And there are also other products slowly chipping away at Microsoft's base. Take a look, for example, at the OpenOffice package: It stacks up very well against MS Office, and it is also totally free.

Likewise if you need image editing software, check out open-source Gimp, or even Google's Picasa, before you shell out on MS product. Google's Gmail is also well worth a look if you have a broadband connection. With its innovative approach to mail filing and retrieval, this Web-based service could well be the shape of the future.

The road ahead

Though muscular, the above challengers are not likely to have Microsoft on the canvas anytime soon. More worrisome are the changes looming in the core structure of the software market itself. The most urgent of these is probably the rise of open-sourcing, led by Linux et al. However, whereas these products have thus far only grazed Microsoft, the European Union has really put in the elbow by ordering MS to reveal the operating code for its server programmes.

Another concern for Microsoft is that with the increasing penetration of broadband we may all start to 'outsource' our software needs. Granted, this is not an immediate threat, but the groundwork is now being laid: Companies offering customer management solutions via the internet have found the market receptive, and Google's Gmail already provides a model for fully Web-based e-mail.

The danger here is that if we can simply go on-line when we, say, have some word processing to do, expensive suites such as Office will be rendered obsolete. A further, and highly crucial, problem for Microsoft is the increasing number of lean, fast-moving competitors it now faces. The company currently has almost 60,000 employees and is about as responsive as XP Professional running on 32 MB of RAM.

The prime case in point is Longhorn (aka Vista), the grandly self-feted OS currently in development. After finally acknowledging that XP has some serious issues in areas such as security and structure, Microsoft is taking just as long to get the new version to market. The most recent ship date is the end of 2006, but even then it seems some major compon-ents will have to be released later in service packs.

Add to this that MS is being stomped by Apple in the music download biz and Google in Net search technology, and it is small surprise that many analysts are starting to use words like 'highly vulnerable' to describe its mid-term corporate health.

Bill's vision

As overcast as its prospects may look, Micro-soft still has some major aces up its sleeve. The most obvious of these is its present mar-ket dominance, while another is its massive financial reserves. And, of course, it's got Bill, and Bill's got a crafty plan: Diversification, or, more specifically, media centres and game consoles and ultra-techie mobile phones and other assorted consumer goodies.

Despite a lawsuit alleging a key design flaw, in the first month since its release, the Xbox 360 game console has seen more demand than life boats on the Titanic. This is not only extremely cheerful news for Microsoft now, it also augers well for the future, when all those satisfied teen gamers grow up and start shopping around for their first computer — or as MS hopes, their first Media Center.

The Media Center is really something of a Holy Grail. It combines all the functions of your personal computer, audio/visual equip-ment, telephone, home automation system and various other delights in a single compact wireless hub. It is about as close as we have come to 'convergence' — a concept that has been giving the electronics industry wet dreams for years.

However, for now the Media Center's bank account-emptying price means it is largely a glossy ad for a better Microsoft tomorrow — a day the company is predicting will arrive sometime within the next three or so years. In the meantime, we will have to make do with one of those new mobile super-phones, which MS claims are only just slightly less fantastic. Good luck getting yours in Japan.

So, what does all this mean for Microsoft? Well, after totting up the pluses and minuses, it seems like the company will be around for a while yet — it just won't be in the form we currently know. But, basically, almost any change in the status quo is welcome. Bill and his guys are not only weak in the innovation department, their proprietary business model shackles those who would push forward.

Obviously this is bad for you and I, but it is also ultimately proving detrimental for Microsoft itself. So, if you have an ounce of compassion in you, do Bill a big favour and become a more proactive consumer: Try out open-source soft-ware, make use of Web-based services, etc. You will save your-self money and, more importantly, you will help reward the innovators.

Text: Kym Hutcheon • Images: KS