Big companies, especially those who introduce the first of a new product to market, rule for a long time until they fall into complacency and are over taken by their competition. In the 70's and 80's, IBM's near-monopoly on everything computer related was unassailable. People feared or envied IBM for their total dominance of a wide range of computers from desktops to sprawling mainframes that required their own building. But, oh how they have fallen! Is fallen, even a son of the morning!
How did it happen? A series of poor decisions and a failed strategy. If there's any one event, it was when Microsoft and IBM disagreed so significantly on the direction of the next generation operating system (OS/2), that they split and Microsoft implemented their vision as the Windows operating system. Since that moment, Microsoft's star has ascended while IBM's has declined.
Well, it's about to happen again. I'm talking about Windows 8. The beginning of the end for Microsoft. They're about to be eclipsed by Google and Apple, and this time they're not likely to recover.
The current situation is that MS pretty much owns most of what you'd call the "enterprise" space. Businesses that rely on the Windows support and infrastructure to execute their daily operations. They're the new IBM! They own the data center and business desktop. The "consumer" space they share with Google and Apple. For their own personal computing needs, people are increasingly using their smart phones and tablets/iPads . Apple and Google don't yet own the consumer space but they have a big chunk of it and that percentage is increasing.
In response, MS decided to come up with Windows Phone, a program that originally appeared on the ill-fated Zune music player. And they adapted it for a smart phone. It's hasn't sold very well, probably because people are happy with the phones they have. Here's where it get surreal. Microsoft decides to use the Windows Phone software and fit it onto to their desktop OS, replacing the desktop that has "just worked" for at least 25 years. It's an unholy mix of keyboard, mouse and touch and an abandoned desktop metaphor. I wish I could go into details of how awful it really is but that would be too much. I'll just include some favorite links:
A deep dive into Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Microsoft Is In Serious Danger Of Flying Straight Into A Mountain With Windows 8
Why Windows 8 could be the next Vista
8 Things We Hate About Windows 8
The Seven Things I Hate About Windows 8
I use a 27" monitor and find Metro (MS' name for their new desktop) annoying. It insists on displaying every application in full screen mode (there are no windows under this version of Windows) which is overwhelming. The start button is gone, replaced with "tiles". A tile is sort of like a desktop icon but less flexible. Not everyone is going to like Metro is all I can say. But the real deal killer is that now MS is asking all the people who write applications for Windows to write Metro style apps. To support touch as well as mouse and keyboard. If you don't, you'll be forced to use the somewhat broken desktop mode, something similar to the current Windows 7 desktop but without a Start button. And all the annoying screen hot spots that is part of Windows 8.
Apple took the right approach and keeps their phone and desktop version of iOS separate. You can't run a pixel-twiddling program like Photoshop without the accuracy of a mouse. Which is why there are a lot of programs that will never appear on a tablet. Not without a radical re-write. In other words, MS is asking everyone (living or dead) who ever wrote a program for the PC, to re-write it for touch and Metro, a unimaginably huge task. And application support is what makes MS king. Why break everything you ever worked for? So everything that's been before is either broken or hurting.
The other deal breaker is the training issue. Nothing in Metro is intuitive, it's difficult to learn. One thing that always riles me about a new release of Windows is how all the settings are moved around. Every new version puts the network settings, the security settings, all those little twiddly things in different places. I wouldn't mind if there were some reason for it but I can seldom see it. Windows 8 takes this obfuscation of settings to a whole new level. People are going to puke on Metro not because it doesn't work but because they can't figure it out.
All of this this could have been avoided if they kept the traditional desktop and let you launch the Metro environment from there. But they want to be done with it forever, just like the old DOS command line. Just so they could chase after the tablet and smart phone market. It's a textbook case of if it ain't broken, don't fix it. The only thing that was broken was their market share. Nobody was asking for this!
MS's lack of judgement is also revealed in another, smaller aspect of Windows 8. Starting with Office 2007, MS replaced a huge mashed up confusion of command bars, drop down lists, menus and icons with the infamous ribbon. The ribbon is a huge but better organized mash up of tabs, command bars, drop down lists, menus and icons. Because they hate us, they dropped the old interface and forced everyone to use the ribbon. It was met with mixed success but people have finally stopped complaining about it. So now they're adding it to a lot of Windows utilities like Notepad and Explorer. Maybe that's why they think forcing everyone to use Metro out of the box will be a great idea too. But do you see anyone else using the ribbon? I don't and MS has been promoting and supporting it vigorously.
Windows 8 is going to be a hard one to recover from. Much worse than Vista. The performance and compatibility problems the new security model introduced gradually got better over time. People will learn the Metro interface over time but rewriting every application to support touch is probably never going to happen. I'd like to say that over time, MS will improve the Metro interface but I'm loosing confidence in their judgement and fear they might double down on their mistake instead.
Windows 8 is a solution in need of a problem. Zune failed, Windows Phone is loosing millions and I see the same thing ahead for Windows tablets. There wasn't anything wrong with Zune or Windows Phone, it just wasn't better than anyone else's. MS withstood years of losses on the XBox but even if they are prepared to do that for their phones and tablets, success is not guaranteed and they have formidable competition. Even if they survive all that, ruining their enterprise business to chase after a misbegotten vision they will not survive. IBM had to abandon OS/2 for much smaller mistakes.
Maybe my children will see IBM buy out the shell of what's left of Microsoft in the years to come. But the irony of that will probably escape them.
Update: It's 12/2012 and Win 8 has been out for awhile now. Here's a few more links:
Microsoft Has Failed
Microsoft's Problems
Lolz. Good review and references. It's good they tried something new, but it has to be innovative for the right reason and with the right medium. Sounds like they missed the mark. :S
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