Hard to be King

My intrepid cousin Robert recently blogged about his growing consternation with the amount of time people spend hating Microsoft.  His company, Digipede, has created a GRID computing solution for the .NET platform.  Being based in the bay area, he and his group are in ground zero for anti-microsoft sentiment.

We discussed this at length when I was in the Bay Area in early November.

So I've been mulling this over.  So I've been working through some questions:

What is Microsoft?

What does it represent?

Are these two things coordinate?  Is microsoft the entity that people believe it to be?

Why is Google not Microsoft?  Why isn't amazon or apple?

Is Microsoft Big Brother?  Is Microsoft a Monopoly?  Is Microsoft a Bully?

If Microsoft sucks so much, why doesn't someone suck less?

Are they just really big and successful - like the Yankees?  And therefore hated for their success?

Microsoft gained a lot of negative press in the 90s by pressuring OEMs to support only Microsoft, buying and killing competition, and bundling elements with the OS that hampered the operation of third party sofware.  Later, they began to include rigid DRM in Windows and its bundled software.

So ... they're starting out in a bit of a hole.

Microsoft, despite recent interesting and somewhat publicly distributed innovations, will have a hard time digging out of that hole.  Their continued closed source, high cost model breeds contempt among developers and innovators.  Justified or not - as most companies are at least somewhat closed source.  Google and Amazon aren't just handing out their source.

The Office Suite of Related-ware reveals Microsoft's historic focus on a single user paradigm.  Worksharing and collaboration (the central tenets of Web 2.0) in the Microsoft Office world are a nightmare.  One must use the notoriously unreliable SharePoint, the recently acquired Groove, or other not-for-the-timid apps to work together.

One can only pray that Groove comes built-in to future versions of Office and that it's enhanced to allow true real-time multi-user editing of a particular document. 

The Office Suite has several individual apps, all of which treat basic UI issues differently. 

These things aren't meant to pick on Microsoft, but rather to note that since Microsoft started in a position that some consider antagonistic - that everything else that they do will be hyper scrutinized.

However, if Microsoft were universally reviled to the extent that people like to claim -- no one would be using MSN, no one would listen to Robert Scoble, and no one would be awaiting the next release of Windows.

Their integrated apps will likely never match the level of integration shown in the Adobe suite.  Their collaboration model may be antiquated.   Solving both these issues will require a level of redesign that would greatly challenge backward compatibility.

They did, however, take a horrific line of Operating Systems (NT and Win 95) and make them fairly stable, usable to the great unwashed, and of improved security.  Microsoft did this in a situation where hackers had called a jihad against them and spent a lot of time pounding on the (admittedly porous) Microsoft platform.

And, as the largest company in the field, Microsoft should welcome people hating them.  If Linux users didn't hate Microsoft enough to make a different OS that could conceiveably challenge Microsoft, better versions of Windows would not have been as necessary.

We might all be stuck with Windows ME and rebuilding our machines every 6 months -- real monopolies have no need to improve their products.

Microsoft needs people to identify when they step over the line or when they release poor product.  If no one hated Microsoft, we'd really be in trouble.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Web 2.0 anti-microsoft

Comments

[Robert W. Anderson]

Thank you, Jim, as always, for your insightful comments. I don't think I have been clear on this "Anti-Microsoft" issue, though.

I grok the "why" of the anti-Microsoft sentiment. I understand why people feel that way and don't presume that they should forgive and forget (nor even care about Microsoft). Those are fences for Microsoft to mend (if they care to).

The issue I was posting about was the cliquishness of hating Microsoft. Again, no surprise, but somehow the "anti-Microsoft" phrase attaining buzz-word status is too much for me.

BTW: I would also bridle at "anti-Google" or "anti-Java" becoming buzz-words in the Microsoft / .NET crowd.