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.

Windows 7supposed to be the operating system to replace Vista in three years (or less). Will Microsoft continue to be as big a threat to innovation as it was in the past?

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More Windows users are switching to Macs because their Windows PCs are out of date.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.

The Microsoft brand is getting pummeled overseas, in the music industry, and in the server market. Can you even estimate how much good will has been lost? Gates and Ballmer must get indigestion every morning as they scan the headlines on their pocket PCs.

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.

Microsoft is resorting to a Cold War on Open Source and Linux, using fear and uncertainty as it primary weapons. Microsoft is using this threat to bring Open Source developers and Linux suppliers — and their large clients — to the bargaining table to pay licenses. The patents should be challenged, because many of them are probably suspect. But these patents probably won’t be challenged in court, because Microsoft does not want a public legal fight. Microsoft would rather keep the Open Source community muttering underneath its breath, and reveal nothing.

Updates, patches, and configurations for Microsoft Windows PCs throw businesses for a loop, and slowly the IT departments of these businesses are responding. And they’re not jumping on the Windows Vista bandwagon. Herein lies a tale of two successful deployments of alternatives.

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.