Microsoft has more than a few thorns in its side lately, but that’s what happens to megalithic companies expanding and overflowing their manicured lawns into the brush. The software/search/game/everything-else company is more than a giant, it’s a fat giant, living off the spoils of a decade before, suddenly noticing the trouble it has climbing stairs.
What’s worse, companies like Google and Mozilla are fit, fast running, popular, have swell hair-dos, and know how to play ball. Microsoft is the grumpy old fat curmudgeon down the road yelling at these young whippersnappers to get off his lawn, and he’s been really touchy lately.
Ok, so the writer admits that’s a whole bunch of metaphors in just a few sentences-some of us can beat a point to death, but it should be very clear right now what I mean.
The buzz this week in Redmond wasn’t around legal battles or staff defections or balding chair-throwing billionaires. It was about Microsoft’s surprise announcement to restructure itself in an effort to drive “growth and innovation.” The Tin Man is oiling himself up to get in the game.
Don’t think for a minute I’m through with the metaphors.
A lot of talk has been made about Google’s massive affront on Microsoft: controlling search, poaching MS employees, taking over as top power brokers, creating useful, seamless, lightweight application after lightweight application among rumors of open source browsers and operating systems. Hell, they’re out-Microsofting Microsoft!
And they’ve done it in a way that even Mr. Bill Gates admits is “more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with,” an assertion that leaves Steve Ballmer looking like Eric Schmidt just stole his girlfriend.
I told you so.
And just when you have a hunch that Microsoft has gotten too big and slow for its own good, wheezing and tugging on its shorts trying to keep up, you read a Wall Street Journal article that goes into explicit detail about how the next version of Windows was so gargantuan a task that 4000 engineers had to agree on a way to simplify it. And hence the delay in the release of the upcoming Windows Vista (previously Longhorn).
Microsoft is taking a cue from Google here–a pride-swallowing admission that the company that helped change the world 30 years ago has to change its Establishment ways to keep up with another world-changing company 20 years its junior.
According to Robert A. Guth, of the WSJ, Microsoft has to seriously consider the light-weight plug-in style of programming. Guth says the retooling of Windows Vista was due to one key reason:
“..the growing threat from rivals such as Google Inc., Apple Computer Inc. and makers of the free Linux operating system. In recent years these companies have been dashing out some software innovations faster than Microsoft. Google has grown particularly effective at introducing new programs such as email and instant messaging over the Internet, watching how they perform and regularly replacing them with improved versions.”
With the dawning of the age of application service providers, Google is hip to the knowledge that web-based everything is the wave of the future. Web-based applications are easy, fast, cheap and/or free, and they’ve taught Microsoft that the honeymoon’s over and changes are badly needed in Redmond.
