Cryptosmith

Ray Ozzie was talking at a conference, reported on by Mary Jo Foley in which he briefly compared the risk to Microsoft by Google and open source. The report also talks about Microsoft’s “culture of crisis.” I think the culture of crisis is the key to their success. Bill Gates was always identifying threats and demanding action: that’s how he kept the company energized even as it grew huge.

Of course, Microsoft is burning their own bed regarding open source. A lot of people stay with Windows because it is familiar and they are afraid of the alternative. They’ve learned how to use XP (which was pretty similar to 2000, and 98, and so on) and it’s easy to just keep using it. Then they arrive at Vista and everything is different! Menus hidden and holding different info. Start menu is radically different. Window frames are completely different.

In other words, at least 80% of computer users could switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu and not suffer any worse than if they’d switched to Windows Vista. Probably the same is true for the ‘upgraded’ Office product versus Open Office.

Historically, Microsoft beat the competition in two ways: first, they weren’t tied to hardware (like Apple and Sun) and second, they added features when they should have been fixing bugs. In other words, they avoided a lot of hardware - and system - integration issues by being hardware neutral. The big vendors would work with Microsoft to fix really glaring problems, but minor things (like the Firewire port that never worked very well on 2000) was swept under the rug.

The big complaints I have about open source are these: lack of a global vision on user interface design, lack of system-wide planning (a general case of the GUI design problem), and unreliable support. Microsoft has made itself the richest company on the planet while suffering the same shortcomings - and charging for their software the whole time.

The obvious strategy for competing with open source is through added value: you pay for Microsoft products so you get something better. Microsoft can’t use this strategy. At this point the feature war is over: most people know how to write letters in Word or do spreadsheets or create presentations. The basic features are well known and present in both MS Office and Open Office.

Microsoft came to dominate the Office field by offering more features than the competition at a time that features mattered. Now most people just want to get some simple work done, and Open Office does that just fine, and it does it for free. Microsoft chased out the competition and then leveled the playing field. That left it open for open source.

Posted under Household Tech |