The (in)significant threats to Microsoft

Introduction to the Software Wars

I am not sure how many of you have seen the above image w.r.t the wars that the Microsoft empire has to fight day in and day out on various fronts against the various alliances in the software arena. This image has not been updated for two years now & a lot has happened in that time frame which has added more wounds to Microsoft and it is not yet clear as to how the empire is going to strike back.

I will not go deep into explaining the above picture, a lot of it is evident to most geeks and if not, there Google to the rescue as always. :) I will however try to let you know what has happened after this picture was updated last, so that you are up to date on the war the Microsoft empire is fighting.

A year after the above version of the image came out a new kind of device was unleashed on unsuspecting holiday shoppers in the US and elsewhere around Thanks Giving & Christmas, when the hugest sales happen in the consumer electronics segment. The erstwhile non-entity was an immediate success & the world came to be deluged with millions of pint sized devices called the "netbooks". Yes, the last quarter of 2007 saw the birth & rise of EeePC that ran on Linux.

The Pint Sized OS [Phony] Wars

The small size allowed the netbooks to be carried around almost anywhere. It was smaller & lighter than a laptop and bigger than a PDA/iPhone. It served a different purpose - browsing, multimedia & light weight apps. 

What EeePC evoked as a response from the M$ empire was an uncomfortable extension of the life of Windows XP, even though M$ had released Vista in 2007. We all know about the shame to Microsoft from Vista. Till date Vista's biggest competetion is, no not Linux, but rather *GASP* Windows XP! :( And being unable to get people to upgrade their OS to Vista means that people will not upgrade their hardware. Which has been the typical ploy of Microsoft & its hardware cohorts over these many years. Keep selling new verions of software that need bigger machines & sell the bigger machines with only Microsoft's or its cohorts software.
 
EeePC & the other resulting netbooks (for almost everybody had started launching netbooks) however topsy-turvied the whole formula in the market.

The netbooks run on smaller machines with far less powerful processors & way smaller memory & screen sizes. Meaning, Vista could not run on these machines. Even XP is not so suited for the small screen sizes. Here Linux scored heavily initially. However Microsoft reluctantly retooled XP for the small screen sizes & postponed the end of life for XP for netbooks.

Canonical, the company headed by the billionaire space tourist & geek, a very eligible bachelor in his mid thirties, Mark Shuttleworth, and the producers of the most popular & easy to use of Linux distributions, came out with a new distro for Intel's Mobile Internet Device or MID platformbased on a GUI framework called the Hildon . Ubuntu Netbook Remix was based on this distro & increased the functionality of the netbooks even further. :)

The reason I mention Canonical is not because of these new distros but for a totally different but related reason. Canonical, as a business, has recently reached a stage where it has become a self sustaining company. An exerpt from a New York Times article:

Mr. Shuttleworth contends that $30 million a year is self-sustaining revenue, just what he needs to finance regular Ubuntu updates. And a free operating system that pays for itself, he says, could change how people view and use the software they touch everyday.

Nothing that will topple the empire of Microsoft, but an indication that the company that keeps inflicting wounds will now be sustaining itself in the future all by itself!

But Netbooks & alternative Operating Systems are not the only bane of Microsoft now. Microsoft is trying to counter these both with its all new Windows 7, which has got rave reiviews from many quarters, even the FLOSS guys, including Mark Shuttleworth. He has gone on record praising Windows 7 & says that he welcomes the upcoming war. An exerpt from an article on The Register :

Shuttleworth believes that a decent edition of Windows will mean Microsoft finally has to charge full price and that Redmond will finally stop allowing OEMs to use low-cost copies of Windows XP instead of paying full price for the full version of the official flagship - Windows Vista.

The Office War Field

The other angle is on Microsoft's cash cow, no not its Windows operating systems, but rather its office productivity suite Microsoft Office. MS Office is undoubtedly the largest means of revenue and the defacto standard for most people. If theres no Word on the desktop, most people panic immediately! ;)

However Office 2007 has welcomed a lot of slashback primarily because of the cost & hardware requirements. Have we all not been fretting with the very unresponsive new Office on our machines since they were imposed on us in the office? We can do nothing but grumble since our IT is a Microsoft bastion and are more concerned with toeing in line with the Microsoft sales folks demands rather than being interested in the productivity of our associates. *SIGH* But I am a minority voice with no shout in it nor any punch behind it, so let me leave that story alone.

Google docs has fast created support for all MS office file formats and is available free of cost. It has even come out with a new browser all of its own to give a very performance to users of its web services like GMail, Google Docs, Calendar, etc. And no, these are not beta versions for enterprises as they are for us normal users who use it for personal purposes.

To add to this Google now has unofficially launched Google Drive it seems. VentureBeat has details on this:

Today, a piece of code found in the Google Pack software bundle includes both a product category and description for GDrive. 
The code, found by blogger Brian Ussery and further detailed by Google Operating System, clearly states that GDrive is an “Online file backup and storage” utility. But the two descriptions are even more interesting.
The first reads:

GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents.

The second reads:

GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime and from any device — be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone.

Combined with the growth of SaaS & netbooks, Google docs doesn't seem to be an unattainable option to the costly MS Office. Just ensure that you have a back up of each file on your own harddisks though. ;)

Office over the years has not been able to even open its own older formats of its documents. Try opening any old project documents that were saved last in Office 97. [They are anyways lost to us, most cant even find such old documents due to lack of repositories back then.] But at a global level this is a huge issue, especially to governments. And hence Microsoft arm twisted the ISO to include its patent encumbered new office files format as a new standard when one already existed and which has not been supported by Microsoft itself!

The Clouds of War 

You have most probably heard a passing reference to Software as a Service (SaaS) or at least Cloud Computing in the past year or two, unless you have been living under a rock and discovered Internet only now. :P Combined with Green IT initiatives and reducing licensing costs, its a lucrative option for many small & medium businesses.

Wikipedia defines Cloud Computing as:

Internet ("cloud") based development and use of computer technology ("computing"). It is a business information management style of computing in which typically real-time scalable resources are provided “as a service” over the Internet to users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure ("in the cloud") that supports them.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a huge list of web based services that the company provides on the cloud. Google too provides everything on the web, includig its App Engine that allows developers to build applications on its infrastructure. Enterprise apps like CRM & ERP are provided on the cloud too by companies like salesforce.com.

And Microsoft too has entered the game, albeit late, with a very ironical name for its cloud services - Azure. Windows Azure & Azure Services Platform are supposedly a direct match for AWS & Google app engine. BTW Azure, in English, of course means a clear blue sky, without any clouds! ;)

Gaming the Wars

Vista is not a failure only in the upgrade revenues of Microsoft but also has harmed the Microsoft gaming business. Gaming has been a strong area for Microsoft with both its PC based games as well as XBox systems. But the vista only nature of DirectX 10 and the comparative failure of vista itself has cost M$ dearly. XBox 360 also has been criticized for "rushing" & getting some of the worst reliability ratings of any game console ever.

Mobile Warfare

iPhone, Symbian, Android, Maemo, Qt are all bad news for Microsoft on the Mobile front. Windows Mobile has numerous companies supporting it, but the runaway success of iPhone and the growing might of the FLOSS options of Android from Google, Maemo, Symbian & Qt from Nokia are not stuff that Microsoft can ignore.

If you are aware of any other fronts Microsoft is being attacked on but has not been covered either in that diagram above or my post, please feel free to let me know. :) If I get enough dope, I might come with a follow up post! :D