Following is the lead item in this week’s issue of my weekly newsletter, A-Clue.Com
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Microsoft is doomed.
Its fate was sealed over 20 years ago.
Back in the early 1980s, when I was just getting started in the business, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates faced a fateful decision. They had text-based operating systems, Apple DOS in the case of Jobs, MS-DOS in the case of Bill. Both wanted to move toward a graphical user interface, toward an OS based on bit-map graphics.
Jobs bit the bullet. His 1984 Apple Mac was incompatible with his older gear. He shrugged and left his old users as orphans.
Gates went the opposite way. He made certain that Windows would be "backward-compatible" with DOS. Users would lose nothing. They would have the best of both worlds.
But that, in the long run was the mistake. Because while Jobs split from his past, Gates kept it alive. And in doing that he made certain that Microsoft Windows would become, and remain, a House of Cards.
The formula for a House of Cards is quite simple and elegant. Cards are stacked leaning against one another, in the form of a pyramid, and if nothing happens the pyramid is stable.
This is not as goofy as it sounds. Corrugated cardboard is based on the same principle. So is the honeycomb fiber used on modern jets. You clad the air-filled corrugations with something like paper (in the case of cardboard) or carbon (in the case of fiber) and the result is quite strong.
The trouble lies when you try to build on this platform, without the stiffening. If the bottom of a structure is unstable, it will fail. Windows is inherently unstable, and always will be.
Worse, the whole client-dominated world of Windows is inherently unstable. I learned this recently when I had what turned out to be a hard drive failure. I lost a ton of valuable stuff. Not to mention hundreds of dollars and days of valuable work time.
This has, in fact, been happening to me throughout my career. In contrast to most writers, most of what I have written in my lifetime has been lost. Anything that was not published in book format, anything that did not make it through the transition from the old text-based Internet to the World Wide Web, is gone. Anything I left on a floppy disk, or an old hard drive leading up to the present day, is gone – irretrievable, never to be recovered.
Note the exceptions. What I have done on the Internet – save the Interactive Age Dailies which CMP Media deliberately removed from view in the late 1990s – is still floating around. You can even find some of my old Newsbytes stuff.
The reason for that is redundancy.
The Internet is robust because it is redundant. Data does get through because, though you cut a variety of paths between a file and its destination, routers find new paths. A mesh network is highly stable, because of redundancy. Internet data is automatically cached – on clients, on servers, inside the network – so that once this goes out to you there will be literally thousands of copies of it around.
Now, caching and redundancy helped a lot in my recent crisis. We were able to get data from my old machine (like this file) onto a portable hard drive. My programs (nearly all of them) were already copied to my notebook. There will be some inconvenience, but most of my stuff will survive.
This is no thanks to Windows, however. It’s thanks to Moore’s Law. It is Moore’s Law that has driven the cost of a 60 gigabyte USB drive down to $89 at retail. It is Moore’s Law that has driven the cost of a new 160 GB drive down to $59.
If you’re dependent on a client, if your security is based on a Windows topology, you or your company are literally living inside a House of Cards. If you based yourself on a network, with redundant paths and adequate back-up, you will survive.
Beyond the decision to maintain backward-compatibility, the Microsoft business model also meant the company would go it alone. The proprietary business model means that, if there is a flaw with Windows (and there always is) you are dependent on Microsoft to fix it. If there is a flaw in, say, Free BSD (on which the Mac OS X is now based) you can fix it yourself, and so can other members of the community. You will still need to distribute and load patches – the process for this remains a Windows strength – but again you will survive.
The Mac model, in many ways, offers the best of both worlds. You get a large proprietary vendor who stands behind your stuff, as well as an active community with access to source code. Other big companies like Sun Microsystems have figured out that this redundant model works well.
Open source, remember, is a byproduct of the Internet. It did not precede it in any meaningful way. True, Linus Torvalds hatched his kernel in 1991, but the process by which open source develops is dependent on the Internet, which in turn is redundant, multi-pathed, and stable.
No matter how big Microsoft becomes – and it’s quite big – it can never win this game of Ogre.
Windows, and the Microsoft business model, are both based on sand. This is why Bill Gates has remained paranoid for 20 years, why he became so angry at the government’s antitrust case against him.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. And it doesn’t mean they won’t get you, either. In this case, they are certain to. It is only a question of time…
MS may be doomed, but doom doesn’t come much better than becoming the richest man in the world and creating thousands of fellow millionaires.
Agreed that MS has blighted the lives of its long-suffering customers, but even there, thousands are gainfully employed sorting out the mess.
Just about any computer company would be delighted to last 20 years, before being replaced by something better.
Nothing lasts forever. MS will either re-invent itself or be replaced. But that applies to every long-lasting company.
MS may be doomed, but doom doesn’t come much better than becoming the richest man in the world and creating thousands of fellow millionaires.
Agreed that MS has blighted the lives of its long-suffering customers, but even there, thousands are gainfully employed sorting out the mess.
Just about any computer company would be delighted to last 20 years, before being replaced by something better.
Nothing lasts forever. MS will either re-invent itself or be replaced. But that applies to every long-lasting company.
All business enterprises are ephemeral. Some less than others but nearly no enterprise lasts centuries. Its like architecture. There may be a few ancient relics but they’re not vital for their initially intended purposes. The rest are gone unremembered.
If I were a scholar of business I could likely create a megabyte-sized list of names. Some recent goliaths are easily conjured: Chrysler, AT&T, IBM, Xerox, Polaroid, U.S. Steel.
That Microsoft will go down this path, to be replaced by some other paradigm, is not news. Its a “dog bites man” story.
All business enterprises are ephemeral. Some less than others but nearly no enterprise lasts centuries. Its like architecture. There may be a few ancient relics but they’re not vital for their initially intended purposes. The rest are gone unremembered.
If I were a scholar of business I could likely create a megabyte-sized list of names. Some recent goliaths are easily conjured: Chrysler, AT&T, IBM, Xerox, Polaroid, U.S. Steel.
That Microsoft will go down this path, to be replaced by some other paradigm, is not news. Its a “dog bites man” story.
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