Microsoft Is Not A Software Company

Microsoft are a worldwide IT name; anyone who uses a PC at school, work or often home knows the Windows boot screen, times, icons, UI, sounds, as well as the never ending round of malware scanning and cleaning. Microsoft software comes installed on many third party devices. So Microsoft are a software company right? A worldwide software company no less. I'm not so sure.

For me, a "software company" is a company who understands software. It's a company who either writes it's own software, or leads a project that writes it's own software. It's a company who can look at the UI, design, usability, stability, functionality and create a high quality, reliable product for their customers.

Microsoft don't write much of their own. They buy, copy or just pilfer from others, and do the re-branding and Windows only lock-in changes to then present it as a Microsoft creation. They also seem pretty isolated in their views of the markets they're in, to the extent that they seem oblivious to what the competition has done, and what the customers of that market expect as a bare minimum. How else could they release products that are years behind the competition?

Remember this is a FTSE 100 company with a WORLDWIDE brand we're talking about here, not a startup with a handful of staff trying to break into a market. This is a company who for a long time have been swimming in cash. The income from Windows and Office licenses alone have managed to fund plenty of R&D on products. This is an R&D that many projects and companies would die for. It's a budget that pays for high quality products to arrive on the shop shelves, which in turn become revenue streams to help fund more R&D, or it would be IF Microsoft were a "software company". How is it possible that they constantly fuck it up so badly?

Windows & Office

Most people don't choose Windows or Office, they buy a PC with Windows already installed because it's all the shop has, and it's all they know. They either get Office pre-installed, or install it because their employer has chosen that Microsoft file formats are vital to the existence of their company. People know Windows and Office, they know it's quirks, very few actually want to use them.

It took until Vista for Microsoft to hear the cacophony of complaints about running Windows as an admin, with admin privileges was a large part of why Windows was so prone to malware. A "software company" would have spotted that many years before, and took steps to fix it. It's not even as if it's a new solution to the problem, UNIX does that as standard. UNIX was around before Microsoft were even formed, let alone the first version of Windows shipping.

Internet Explorer

Before Firefox ignited the browser innovation exodus Microsoft left IE6 to stagnate despite the howls of derision it got from technical people. The attitude of "well, people don't have a choice, so why should we spend time and money fixing it?" was pretty evident. When it became clear that Firefox was streaking ahead on technical merit and that users were flocking away from IE to Firefox, they had no choice but to dust off the code and start fixing it.

The result is now that Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Chromium, IE and Safari etc are all competing for users, this is a good thing forced on Microsoft. A "software company" wouldn't have been satisfied with such a bad browser in the first place to see it as a fait acompli and leave it to gather dust. A "software company" would have actually used their own products, saw how shit the user experience was and set about fixing it.

Exchange

I've seen countless people who are required to administer Exchange servers as part of their duties, I've not seen any who claim it's anything other than a horrid experience. They loathe it. A "software company" makes the experience as seamless for both users and administrators. The less time and effort people have in using and updating their software, the more time and effort they can put into the main goal; the tasks they were trying to do with it. This brings me onto the next point.

Updates

When the user or administrator has to spend ages clicking through lots of wizards to update their programs, the design is flawed. When each new updated application involves:

• Finding the update part on the menu
• Being told there is a new version
• Which opens a browser window (often IE even if it's not set as default)
• Where you have to click through a couple of pages to download the new version
• Click to open the file browser
• Click through to the downloads folder
• Find and double click the exe file
• Click through several pages of the installer wizard
• Remember to untick the extras like "install X toolbar" and "install A, B & C additional software" because you came for the update after all

This is a similar but varied process for all third party software running on Windows. The Windows update itself is just as flawed in it's usability:

• Using the standard non-descriptive description for each update, with a KB876543285 instead of a user readable name
• Stating that it "may require a restart" knowing that almost ALL Windows updates require a restart
• Requiring some updates in place before others can even be detected, meaning that even after you think you've updated, you get more notifications

A "software company" would not release a platform that requires rebooting to install the most minor of update to the system. A "software company" would make it as easy as possible, and as quick as possible to update. Any time you have to factor reboots and attention sapping wizard clicks into the equation you're disrespecting your customers. Your customers can't just click a few times, then go for lunch while it updates, ready to resume when they get back. They have to sit and nursemaid it through the process. This means people all around the world being paid to sit and nursemaid updates on Windows instead of contributing to their work and the economy.

Malware

Microsoft do like to claim they invented a lot of stuff when they didn't. They also like to claim they're world leaders in areas where they're a joke. The one area Microsoft really have cornered the market in, is one that no company would want to be associated with; malware. No other peice of technology is so compatible with malware as Windows. Entire industries offering anti-spyware, anti-virus etc products have sprung up to plug the gap Microsoft have left. A "software company" wouldn't design a product as secure as a paper tank. It has brainwashed users into believing that "that's just how computers work, you need all of this protection" when it's their own incompetence which left the holes.

News stories of botnets, virii, keyloggers etc are all exclusive Windows stories. It's infected Windows machines who make up those networks, spreading their malware to other vulnerable Windows machines. There is no such thing as a "PC Virus", any malware is written to exploit a flaw in an existing piece of software. Any virus targeting a flaw in a Microsoft only application or the platform itself is a "Windows Virus". It would be nice if our "trusted expert" IT reporters could distinguish the difference.

They then have the gall to propose tax payers money be used to clean up the problem they created. Yes, other people pay for their incompetence. Not only that but using lobbyists they ensure that the insecure technological monstrosity called Windows is the mandated choice forced upon people, but that's covered further down.

XBOX

Arguably the one success Microsoft have had in living memory is their XBOX gaming console, and XBOX 360. There are plenty of people who are actually choosing an XBOX because it's good at what it does. Microsoft being Microsoft couldn't even do something good right however, the reliability and failure rates turn the XBOX into a popular platform which isn't nearly as profitable as it could be if the consoles were reliable.

Windows Phone 7

The smartphone market was set alight by Apple's iPhone. They set the bar in what people expect, and know is possible. Any device entering the smartphone market will be compared to the iPhone. Android competes side by side, it offers a comparable experience in terms of flashiness, usability and functionality, either built in or as installable apps. For a while Microsoft tired and failed to say "we have Windows Mobile, it's just as good" but nobody was buying it.

A "software company" would have taken a serious look at both the iPhone and Android, and the others like the Blackberry, Symbian etc to find out what a smartphone is, what people like and dislike about them. It would not be living in a bubble where those products already on the shop shelves and in customers hands simply don't exist. It's almost like the obsession with rebooting has infected their product designers, thinking that if they simply ignore the existing competition, they can reboot the market with their new product and people will forget all those pesky changes to their memory, like "hey I've been using an iPhone for a year, it was cool but I decided to get an Android phone the following year, it's cool too" to "ooh, what's this? you say it's a smart phone? nice". It simply doesn't work, people are not Windows.

Having a PR stunt which has a mock funeral of the iPhone, the same product that Microsoft engineers seemingly didn't even look at, but somehow knew their outdated "new arrival" would kill is just a joke. I do wonder how many people in the crowd filmed it on their iPhones and Android phones to upload and mock.

A "software company" does not release a device that's a few years behind the current technology of it's competition with the promise of updates bringing baseline features. The competition is not static. Both Apple and Google have plans to improve and refine their platforms in various ways. In other words, both the iPhone and Android are miles ahead technically, and they're both getting better. They have momentum and mindshare.

Just when you realise you're so far back in the race with a LOT of ground to make up, you realise your salvation is in the apps store. You have a pitiful number of apps compared to the competition, so what master stroke do you roll out? Yes you ban apps under GPL licences. The more apps you have available to install means more consumers will be tempted to use your platform over the competition. The more users the platform has, the more developers will make the effort to create apps for your platform. To quote Obi Wan Kenobi "it's a symbiont circle, surely you must see that". A "software company" would indeed see that. Boss Nas didn't see it, Microsoft seems not to see it either.

Just like the PC market, the smartphone market is dominated by hardware made by one company and an OS made by another. This means that hardware vendors can pick and choose which OS to go with. Unlike like the PC market where Microsoft have bullied, bribed and threatened to ensure exclusivity to Windows, most hardware vendors are choosing not to go with Microsoft's current offering, they are going heavily with Android. A "software company" would make sure they have a great product that people would WANT to use.

The only way Microsoft can get any traction at all, is to bully or bribe vendors into including some WP7 phones as part of their product line up. Retailers don't want to stock them because they're mostly going to to be gathering dust, taking up space and money that could be reinvested back into more iPhone and Android stock that actually sells. Windows Phone 7 is nothing more than a curiosity for shoppers.

The other way is to send one of it's former managers Mr Elop in as the CEO of a hardware vendor, in this case it's Nokia, to "rescue" them with a partnership with his former employer Microsoft. By moving the entire focus of the company to WP7 it's a huge gamble, although it may at least provide brand differentiation, in that nobody else was stupid enough to do what he did for Nokia. Most corporate partnerships are seen by shareholders of both parties as a positive thing, and the share prices increase with expectation that it's going to yield a new dawn. This deal was so well received that Nokia's share prices plummeted on the news. It's like being saved by a corpse who then proceeds to use the cover of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to French kiss you.

If that wasn't enough, the first upgrade to this new fledgling platform went seemingly untested and bricked some peoples phones enough that the only fix was to take it back to the retailer for a replacement. Yes all platforms have their glitches but this is not the output of a "software company". The other way to look at it, is that this update was up to the usual Microsoft standards.

Standards & Government Contracts

A "software company" designs good products, which are feature rich, feature appropriate, efficient and stable. This means people actually want to use them. Why is it that Microsoft spend so much time and resources twisting file formats to lock people's data into their own programs, forcing them to use Microsoft products to access their data? If their products are good enough that wouldn't matter. The fact that they do this as a matter of course shows they know the products are not nearly good enough to be used on merit. The same argument applies; if these products are "best in class" then they'd be chosen on merit. They would not need bribery to get there.

The Future

Microsoft are one of many who abuse the patent system, specially when some other company, ie REAL "software company" arrives to outperform the very best Microsoft can offer, the (often unspecified) patent threats come out to close it down or force it to cough up royalties on legally unproven claims. This prevents competition, it prevents the consumer choosing a product on merit because a better product is denied them. Increasingly we're seeing Microsoft shift it's focus, and morph into a patent troll. They've long since given up on actually innovating on anything, but as long as they own the idea for it in the form of a patent they can extort money from those who actually do innovate.

The CES this year was an almost all Android zone. In previous trade shows Microsoft are getting very obvious as a "me too" company. "This is our new device, we call it a tablet". In many ways Linux has caught up with Windows on the desktop, in many others it's shot way passed Windows in terms of security, stability and functionality. If that wasn't enough there are some VERY nice themes for both Gnome and KDE to make it look just as slick as Windows 7 Ultimate, for free.

It's gotten to the point where many tech journalists are now asking themselves if Microsoft deserve a keynote spot. Those spots are meant to be for the big innovators and market shifters, to show off their vision for how markets can evolve. Any "me too" company who consistently fails to deliver on it's promises does not qualify.