Get Off Microsoft

Good news! Competition has returned to the industry. I can go on to better topics now. Thanks for all the fish!

As Apple eats away at Microsoft’s market share on the consumer side of PCs and mobile devices, and Google chips at Microsoft Office’s share in business, Microsoft is caught in the middle and facing a two-front war.

What will change the landscape and make it possible for larger numbers of users, especially corporate users, to overcome Microsoft inertia? I’m tracking the development of software as a service, smartphones that don’t do Windows and don’t need to, Apple’s OS X that may some day run Windows XP apps, and Linux on the desktop, which is growing fast in overseas markets.

More Windows users are switching to Macs because their Windows PCs are out of date. People have finally figured out (after about a decade of it being true) that there is no penalty in switching from Windows to the Mac.

Microsoft has lots to worry about and can’t point fingers at iPhone security while living in the glass house of Windows Mobile. This explains why the Gartner analysts that adhere to Microsoft’s way of thinking took the first propaganda shot against the iPhone, calling it unfit for business due to lack of security measures.

If Apple’s OS X ever became seriously vulnerable to a virus or worm in the wild, as Windows is routinely vulnerable to, it would create press headlines way, way beyond what you see now.

Among several Windows Vista patches released yesterday, Microsoft included one that lets iPods be disconnected without getting corrupted. This time, Microsoft blinked first and fixed the problem.

So far there have been no reports of trouble with the iTunes 7.1 update, other than Vista problems. The new iTunes version 7.1.1., released last week, which packs a lot of new features, fixes some of these problems, but not all.

It looks like Apple is serious about not licensing its FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology used to protect music sold through its iTunes online store.

The iPod and iTunes software for Windows needs a patch to work with Windows Vista. But iTunes and the iPod are not the only media players, devices, and applications that break. After five years of propaganda and several months of beta, many vendors are still not ready for Vista.