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More Windows users are switching to Macs because their Windows PCs are out of date.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

This is how Microsoft gets away with “interoperability” — co-opting proven standards (like XML) and turning them into Microsoft pseudo-standards, which are then set as defaults for the program while offering the real standards as options.

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.

Windows XP users — have you recently been “unable to complete genuine Windows validation”? You may be a pirate — or at least Microsoft thinks you might be.

What might make Microsoft’s Zune better than the iPod is its price — as yet unannounced. But how low must Toshiba go before anyone will pay attention?

Apple’s 30th anniversary is a prime subject for journalists this month, and I’ve fielded a number of interesting questions concerning Apple’s success. I gathered some relevant questions and my responses here.