Windows 7 - Begining of the End for Microsoft?

Let me put this straight from the start, I am not one of these dedicated anti-Microsoft types with a pathological hatred of anything coming out of the Redmond stable. I spent the majority of my career in the 90's working with the Microsoft platform from DOS 3.0 to Windows NT, GWBASIC to Visual Studio. In my view, Microsoft's dominance of the Desktop and certain elements of Enterprise computing (file, print serving and mail for example) was more down to the poor vision, strategy and business models of its competitors than any MS 'evil planning'.

So Windows 7 is here and available for public download, and judging by the tech news feeds is in demand. Windows 7 needs to be good, even Microsoft admit they cocked-up on Vista. For me though, there's always an inherent problem with a software product line that's been out, what seems like, for ever. It inevitably turns into 'bloatware', and that's what happened to Vista. The problem with an OS is just how many more truly useful features can you add to an operating system? The features MS are touting for 7 seem pretty desperate to me, most of it centring around UI enhancements.

The problem for Microsoft is that user applications are rapidly moving web side, or to the Cloud to use the current buzzword. This website is a good example. The whole content is being managed in a browser, no native OS dependences, I can maintain this Blog from anything from an iPhone over 3G to a Linux Netbook on a Wi-Fi HotSpot in Starbucks. Vista sales were poor, and I believe Windows 7 sales will fall well below Microsoft's expectations for a number of reasons:

• Broadband speeds are set to (hopefully) rapidly increase towards the end of 2009 here in the UK with BT's implementation of 21CN and ADSL2+ enabling more content to be streamed down to the browser.
  
• Web based applications are beginning to become more mainstream with consumers championed by the likes of Google Apps
• Users are trusting more of their data to the web with Online Backup solutions such as Carbonite and Web 2.0 applications such as Flickr
  
• Browsers are heading to become a 'mini OS' in their own right, and are likely to become more robust development platforms - witness Google Chrome with OS like features such as multi-process and threading for rendering, Javascript execution, HTTP download etc.
  
• Web-based apps are set to improve dramatically with the take up of rich AJAX development environments such as ExtJs
• JavaScript is no longer a 'scripting language' for occasional web master tinkering, but rapidly becoming a serious language for application development, supporting OO 'like' concepts through prototype functions.
• Browser vendors will focus on increased Javascript performance as this article shows with Firefox 3.1
• Linux on the desktop is likely to become more mainstream with the rapid growth in NetBook sales, most of which are powered by lightweight Linux Distros such as Linpus and Xubuntu

In my view, the question won't be 'are you a Windows / Linux / OS X user?', it's more likely to be 'are you a IE / FireFox / Opera / Chrome / Safari user?'.

This change will be slow, but I believe will start to increase through 2009/10 in the consumer desktop space first. Corporates are inherently risk adverse and generally slow to change, particularly something as critical as their desktop infrastructure. Even so, with the current economic downturn, companies will start the question the value of paying massive licence fees and, I suspect, begin to embrace Open Source, starting in the data centre first. Once this transformation is complete in the data centre, Enterprises will surely look to desktops next.

So what next for Microsoft? To be fair Microsoft is not the two product company (Office and Windows) it once was. It's revenues are spread across its Client, Server & Tools, Business, On-line and Entertainment divisions. With XBox it showed how it could take on an entrenched incumbent like Sony and win.

Even though more computing tasks are likely to head to the 'Cloud', there still are a number of application domains that will always require heavyweight local processing and file management, 3D modelling & rendering, video, graphics and, of course, gaming to name a few.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect and Bill Gates successor, has put his faith in the Azure Platform in an attempt to get Microsoft dominant in the Cloud Computing space. I personally like the Azure concept. I suspect, though, the biggest challenge to large scale uptake will be in Governments and Corporates concerns over security.

Then there's the small issue of the apps themselves, most Enterprises internal business processes run a mixture of home-grown apps and COTS such as ERP and CRM. You'd have to question the benefits, let alone the feasibility and shear effort and cost, of moving these to the Azure platform.

Microsoft's main hope may be in persuading major app vendors such as SAP to port versions of their solutions to Azure. These vendors, though, tend to have their own SOA and SaaS strategies and Azure will probably not seem attractive to them. Obviously the Oracle's of this world won't be interested in supporting Azure, it just takes too much of their portfolio away

Azure's definitely a gamble for Microsoft.

So what about Windows future. I feel that Microsoft will begin to seriously feel the heat from Linux and possibly offer a number of very low cost (may be even free) Windows variants targeted at low spec 'Internet' PCs and NetBooks. Target revenues from those users who do need desktop power, focusing on features to improve local processing of graphics and video.

You never know, we may yet see an Microsoft 'Open Source' free Windows available for download soon!