The Windows Crapware Ecosystem

An interesting analysis from a MicroISV throws light on one of the problems that Windows suffers from not controlling its ecosystem. THIS is why Apple has done so well with its app-stores.

Dan Bricklin on Surface Pro

Dan Brickin comments  that Microsoft Surface Pro is really an Excel machine.

I think that's a good way of thinking. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that Microsoft ought to be releasing an "Excel Appliance". Much as Google's ChromeBooks are basically browser appliances, Microsoft could have released an "Office Appliance" that booted straight into Office, ignoring the rest of the paraphernalia of an OS and storing / sharing documents in the cloud. It could have created an app-store of Excel plugins. Included Skype and email as part of the mix.

I'd have called it "Surface Excel" and buried the toxic W****** brand for once and for all.

The End of Windows?

This is basically the end for Microsoft. Or, at least, for Windows.

Or let's put it this way. Microsoft threw away technical compatibility. Windows 8 on Arm won't run old Windows software. Microsoft threw away UI continuity - pushing people towards a new tile based interface for touch.

Microsoft kept the brand name "Windows" and the principle that this is the one OS that must run everywhere.

And that didn't pay off.

They must, must, surely see that that is a failed strategy. There is no brand-loyalty to "Windows".  There is no way to lever domination of the enterprise desktop to domination of the personal pocket device. Or casual web-surfing device. The Windows legacy is now just the albatross around the M$ neck.

Metro and the Post-Windows PC

ZDNet has a good article suggesting that Windows 8's Metro stack is going to replace the win32 and .NET stacks of legacy PCs.

It sounds plausible to me. But what should worry everyone at M$ is that it's only the legacy applications which are keeping Microsoft in its dominant position in the enterprise. Metro may be a fine new UI / operating system stack, but without legacy support it's as precarious as WebOS or Meego. Or rather, the only difference between Metro and WebOS or Meego is the inherent conservatism of M$-loyalists in the IT department.

I presume M$ will try to handle legacy apps. with emulation. Which may work on very fast new machines, but I'll be interested to see if this works out on tablets and other low-power / long-battery devices.

There is, apparently, going to be an app-store in Windows 8.

Another package manager for Windows.

How hard would it be for a third-party to build an app-store on Windows that effectively wrapped it? That placed itself and its brand between the customer and Microsoft?

ZDNet Bloggers :

Netbooks killing Microsoft faster than expected

Biggest threat to Microsoft revenue.

Mary-Jo Foley highlights the confusion of Microsoft's Windows upgrade roadmap.

I've no idea what corporate Windows users are likely to do, faced with this mess. But M$ could be making it a lot better. Here's one suggestion : Give Windows 7 away, free-as-in-beer, to all existing Windows Vista licensees. XP users still have to pay to upgrade, but M$ should get everyone off Vista and on to Windows 7 as quickly as possible.

This is, of course, assuming that Windows 7 is as good as everyone says it is. But what about earlier incompatibility issues? Once again I ask, isn't Windows 7 based on the same core as Vista? Are they making it better than Vista by undoing some of the things that were new in Vista? Can 7 be both more compatible with XP and more compatible with all the new .NET stuff that came out on Vista?

Unsurprisingly netbooks are hurting Microsoft.

Allegedly Windows 7 will run pretty well on netbooks. I'm totally ignorant of the details here, but this surprises me. I always assumed that at least some of the reason that Vista appeared so clunky was that more of Windows had moved to Managed Code in a sandboxed virtual machine. Does the performance improvement mean that Windows 7 moves some things out of that? Or have they found a way to make it more efficient?

Whatever the facts of that, it's clear that M$ are cutting the price to compete with free Linux on netbooks. And that's a loss that isn't going to be recovered if (as I predict) the O/S for netbooks remains a commodity. (As in, they won't be able to make Windows an essential as opposed to more-familiar-and-therefore-preferred option.)

Cringely reads the tea-leaves of a recent Samsung announcement : that they are getting out of high-end SmartPhones from which he infers "nah, all phones are gonna be smart, but Samsung want to get out of smartphones with expensive (read Microsoft Windows Mobile) software".

And on the future of mobile platforms :

If I had to bet right this moment on the mobile 85-10-5 of 2011 I'd say iPhone, Android, then RIM, Symbian, or something completely new from behind Door Number Three.

To recap ... Microsoft are in real, real trouble. M$ are a company built around a particular vision that Bill Gates had in the 1970s : that with the right intellectual property protection, a company could be a pure software company, independent of any hardware vendor or service provider. And that vision was spectacularly successful for two decades.

But that business model is evaporating. As Cringley points out : on mobiles, two of the big platforms (Android and Symbian) are now free. The third, and (to-be) biggest (iPhone) is an appendage of a hardware manufacturer.

On the exploding netbook category the contenders are Linux and Windows XP, the product Microsoft is desperate to kill. (Here's a hint to Microsoft. Fix a couple of problems in XP, rebrand it as "XP3" and keep it alive for netbooks.) If M$ are stupid enough to kill XP, and Apple get into the game too, there's no guarantee Microsoft will have much presence here either.

And that's where all the growth is going to be in personal computing over the next few years.

Update : Bonus link to developer view.

Windows Server on Amazon EC2

Good move for both of them.

Mary Jo Foley on Midori, a family of stripped down, "managed code" infrastructure projects within Microsoft. Possibly the aim is to move towards the whole M$ operating system product running inside a light, portable virtual machine.

This is total panic, isn't it?

Or maybe the last desperate attempt at a stand by the Windows / Desktop faction inside M$ ... "we will get it right, next time, honest"?

But they won't. And it doesn't matter. The world has moved on and desktop operating systems are nothing but a strategic red-herring.

The only question, how can M$ elegantly get out of the desktop game? They can't simply abandon it. Open sourcing it is the right thing, long term, but probably too great a cognitive dissonance for now.

So how to keep conveying commitment to windows. How to "do the right thing" support-wise for users. And yet, start to withdraw, gracefully?

Can M$ do it?

Mary Jo Foley asks if Windows 7 will be available in pieces.

It's a sensible thought. I believe that the desktop operating system is (at least currently) a dead-end. It is no longer a place where any kind of interesting platform warring can occur. All desktop operating systems must offer similar resources (access to the capabilities of the underlying hardware, file-system, graphic user-interface including components, media handling etc. etc.)

Until the hardware changes or human requirements change fundamentally, these are more or less static; commoditized.

Windows, Mac and Linux all do a sufficiently OK job of providing for these requirements that the choice of one or the other offers little advantage to the application writer. One chooses to write for Windows because that's where the biggest market is, or Mac because that's where the most exclusive market is, or Linux because of ideological commitment.

Differentiating desktop operating systems boils down to tweaking the inessentials.

This is why Microsoft's huge investment of time, money and goodwill in Vista was a strategic mistake. One which cost the company far more than a desktop OS could ever recover.

Instead, the competitive action has moved to new loci. As I've mentioned on my other blog, there is a dramatic upheaval going on in the software world :

Applications are getting pulverized, fragmented down into smaller, more focussed, single "feature" mini-applications that I tend to call "widgets". This is happening because there are new networks for organizing and plugging the widgets together. Widgets are tethered through web protocols, RSS etc to server based applications in the "cloud" but are only distantly connected to each other.

Increasingly they are running on virtual machines which have successfully wrapped and hidden the operating system. (The browser, the Java Virtual Machine, the Flash virtual machine etc.) One thing that has helped with this is that the web-based applications store user's data in the cloud not on the local machine, and so avoid having to get too familiar with the local file-system.

This software is often self-installing or comes directly from the web. It usually needs no purchasing and relies on no infrastructure of distribution (such as shops selling boxes with DVDs in) It is promoted by word-of-mouse. The extreme example, which I believe is a pointer to the future, is the Facebook app. where knowledge of applications percolates virally through computer-aided-social-networks (YASNS) who's infrastructure helps accelerate their flow. (Google using GMail to push people into it's online wordprocessor and spreadsheet is another example.)

Widgets, then, are small, narrow focussed programs which live natively in both social networks, and data-flow networks, tethered to the cloud.

In general they eschew dependency on the desktop operating system and prefer to run in the browser, JVM, Flash (and maybe Silverlight) virtual machines. By their very existence they contributed to the decline in relevance of the desktop operating system but reignite a platform war among widget containers. There is a lot of room for differentiation in the container : who provides the best video decompression or GUI toolkit, for example.

The other coming platform war is going to be in the cloud. We are seeing the shift from companies providing basic hosting mechanics (servers, database servers) to Amazon providing a suite of cheap, scalable resources for a web-based applications, to Google coming with the beginnings of a complete, integrated development/deployment/hosting platform with Application Engine.

As Folknology puts it in a tweet today :

GAE marks the end of frameworks & the beginning of Platform 2.0. Expect this to be a hum-dimmer of a war between the big players.

Over the next five years there's going to be far more happening on both the integrated cloud development and hosting front, and on the widget-container front than on the desktop. At which point it must start to dawn on Microsoft that they can't afford to waste as much on Windows 7 as they did on Vista. It's not clear that there's any need at all for a new Windows apart from for appearances sake. And to stay in the game.

It's certainly no longer viable to keep the next Windows as the centre of attention or try to fight for world-domination there.

Windows 7 can't be the monolithic, all conquering beast that its ancestors were. Instead, far better to be a swarm of components. Cheap to produce, loosely coupled, a buffet from which users can pick and choose.

Tim Bray's predictions for 2008 ... worth reading.

Paul Graham thinks Microsoft is Dead. Dave Winer disagrees. Sort of.

The caveats don't matter. Graham's greater point is compelling. Microsoft don't really seem to be making it as an Internet Playa. They've neither come up with any really compelling or exciting software on the web-as-a-platform in the last seven years nor have they bought any of the interesting new web 2.0 companies. In fact, the last interesting thing MS did was buy Hotmail which was about 10 years ago.

10 years??? !!!!

...

!!!!!!

In the meantime, it more or less looks like they've bet everything on Vista and lost, big time. The desktop operating system is a commodity. There's no (and will be no) interesting software that really needs Vista. Web served applications can run as easily on Unix. Office and Photoshop will run as easily on Macintosh. And browser-based software will run anywhere.

Microsoft may still have platforms that matter - though it's not easy to imagine where : ASP.NET essential to web-based apps? XBox beating Wii or PS3? Ray Ozzie, their great hope, seems to be missing in action, last seen a year ago speculating about his clipboard while Yahoo has Pipes up and running.

Graham's suggestions for restoring Microsoft's relevance aren't nearly as interesting as mine.

Now, of course, the funny thing is in my day job I use nothing but Microsoft software. I basically live in Windows and (and this may reflect my new status as a project managery kind of guy) Excel.

In fact, this is something I'm trying to think about more. Excel is a truly great piece of software; it's Microsoft's masterpiece. Word is an OK Word Processor. Access is A.N.Other database. Powerpoint is ... well frankly let's not go there.

But Excel is wonderful. It's the universal, "Swiss Army" desktop solution with dozens of little functional "blades". Want a "to-do" list? Excel. Want a status report? Excel? Want to do some calculations? Excel. Want to do some basic string processing? I write VBA macros for the same kinds of simple data crunching that I'd use Perl for in Unix. Want to make a couple of graphs and charts? Excel. Want to mock up some forms? Want to make tables of data and sort and filter them? You guessed it ...

And not only does Excel does all this, it makes it all pretty intuitive. Have a look at how they do Pivot Tables for an example of something pretty slick.

No-one else is even close. Not Google's online spreadsheet. Not Open Office's attempts at catching up. Not WikiCalc. Microsoft's advantage with Excel is undisputed. It's all theirs to throw away.

And what sucks most about Excel? The fact that people are always mailing spreadsheets around to each other and they have trouble keeping a single, up-to-date copy between them. What they need is Excel socialized. And where's socialized Excel? Caught up in turf-wars and lost behind a bunch of vague, confusing products like "SharePoint" and technologies like Excel Services.

Now, if I ran Microsoft, and I was worried about Microsoft being dead, I'd be making the most I could of Excel : pumping money and smart people and advertising into it, setting up skunk-works, hiring clever explainers to get simple messages out, as loudly and clearly as possible.

In particular I'd have :

• Excel Studio : a complete development environment for people to build new applications on top of the Excel engine or to compile spreadsheet-based prototypes into other pieces of software.


• A Social Excel : the Excel client would allow many people to work on a shared spreadsheet either via a central web-server, LAN server, or simply sync. multiple users together over P2P (imagine something like a Skype call working on one spreadsheet.)


• Excel Live : a free, central web-based server to set up groups sharing the same spreadsheet with (obviously) Wiki-like (WikiCalc-like) hyper-linking between spreadsheets


• Excel Express : a completely free-as-in-beer cut-down version of Excel that anyone could download and use to work on a shared spreadsheet. I'd want Excel Express to be as easily available and viral as Skype or Pando.

99% of the world's "semi-structured" data is not in Microformats but in tables in spreadsheets. And, Microsoft pretty much own that. But there's a huge demand (and opportunity) to put it all on the internet. Like I say, this is Microsoft's platform to lose.

If I ran Microsoft ...

We can all fantasize, right?

Here's what I'd do if I ran Microsoft.

• My brand is "Hot"

  
  
  "Hot" not "Live" (which doesn't exist), not "Windows" (which is in trouble), not "MSN" (yeuch!).
  
  
  
  
  • Skin Hotmail.
    I'd tidy up Hotmail to make it CSS compliant. Then get a bunch of designers to churn out multiple Hotmail "themes" (ie. templates + CSS sheets). Get some input everywhere from the ZenGardeners to Design Outpost. Let users choose from a fifty different looks for their Hotmail page.
    
    The result would be cheap, cheerful and generally get Hotmail talked about for a while.
  
  
  
  • De-advertise
    Take most of the advertising off Hotmail. And talk about it very publicly. Maybe put some very discrete text-ads like Google's but nothing more. Tell people I'm willing to lose money on this in order to make Hotmail a more comfortable place for my users.
  
  
  
  • Spelling and grammar-checking in Hotmail
    'nuff said.
  
  
  
  • HotPage
    Whatever it is that MS do with Spaces, blogs, homepages, social networking etc. etc. It should be blended in and standard with your Hotmail account.
  
  
  
  
  




• Open Source Security

  
  I'd admit, right now, that security is not a question of private advantage but of public good. It should be treated as such.
  
  Vista and IE 7 must have an architecture with fairly loosely coupled modules. (If not, MS are fucked anyway.) Take all the security related modules, and release them under a BSD-style license, without patent restrictions. This includes malware detectors, live-updating code and things that check for pirate copies of Windows etc.
  
  Ownership of all these modules should be given to a new, independent, non-profit institution, spun out of Microsoft with some reasonable financing and some good staff. (Think of the Mozilla Foundation.)
  
  This foundation should have a general remit to be responsible for protecting the Windows ecosystem from all threats. As some of its products will be folded back into the main (proprietory) Windows codebase, employees should have the right to see the rest of the Windows source-code.
  




• Channel 9 and MSDN are the same thing

  
  Developer mindshare has always been a key part of Microsoft's success. Ever since MS were a company that made Basic, the whole edifice is balanced on their ownership of the development tools and leadership of a developer community. And, largely, MS have understood that and served that community pretty well. MS development tools are pretty good and not allowed to get rusty. Compared to Sun or Apple or IBM, MS have been relatively forward in opening up and allowing their geeks to take part in the global geek conversation. Channel 9 was a statement of intent and a recognition of the way things are going.
  
  Compared to the free-for-all of MS blogs and Channel 9 and the expectation of smart developers around the world, MSDN looks corporate and restricted and simply ugly. It's time for Channel 9 to take over. Time for MSDN 2.0.
  
  
  
  
  • Lose the subscription charge. Everyone who wants an account can get it for free.
  
  
  • Copy all the documentation into wikis and let people get in there and edit it. There'll need to be some policing by staff. But generally let the wiki stay up-to-date and reflect real problems people have.
  
  
  • Ultimately - and there's a question of "sequencing" here but, nevertheless, ultimately - the conversation with developers is more important to MS than the revenue from the tools. VisualStudio, the various compilers and .NET libraries should eventualy be released as free (open source) software.
  
  
  • MS should really embrace Python. (It could be another scripting language, but Python seems to be most likely.) VS for Python should be given equal billing with C#, ASP and VB.
  
  
  
  
  




• We don't need a browser. We need Flash

  
  Seriously. What value is there in Internet Explorer? MS will never make a penny selling it. The browser is one of the most commoditized components of the web. There's no "rent" to be captured there. Pitifully little incentive for anyone to violate standards like HTML, XML or SVG.
  
  The idea that MS should try to "own" the browser is based on a flawed analogy with the early 90s competition between Windows, OS2 and Mac; an analogy which Netscape originally encouraged (as in "the browser will commoditize the OS") to their own destruction. In fact, while browser standards are commoditizing the OS, the specific flavour is not an issue. Almost unanimously web-service developers are highly wary of getting locked in to IE or Firefox specific code and are targetting all browser standards. Treating the browser as an "ownable" platform is absurd.
  
  There isn't even a public service value in competition between Firefox and IE. Because Firefox is free software, there are dozens of micro-projects pushing it in different innovative directions and building new things on top of it.
  
  IE is a waste of time and money and attention for Microsoft. I'd simply forget it. We can channel some of the team and resources into supporting Mozilla. (And maybe folding some of the good bits into the Mozilla code-base.)
  
  At the same time, there is a remarkably successful proprietory platform on the web. One which has the kind of domination that MS can only dream of. And which seems to have its status almost by accident : Flash.
  
  Seeking advantage for MS, and if I hadn't completely cured myself of the habit of wanting to own platforms, I'd put some serious thought into how I could get hold of, and embrace and extend Flash.
  
  I wouldn't want to buy Adobe / Macromedia. But I might want to buy Laszlo Systems and push Flash authoring into Visual Studio.
  
  I'd make Flash a first-class citizen of the XBox and of XBox Live Market.
  
  I'd put a player as standard into Windows (probably as part of Media Player).
  
  Like I say, if I was still not cured of the whole "embrace and extend" tactic, this is where I'd probably try it. To allow some of the Windows media file formats to be embedded in Flash.
  
  Oh, and as we're in the realms of pure fantasy here, why not buy Broadband Mechanics and put Marc Canter in charge of the MS assault on the home.
  

Update 2007 : I wrote some stuff about the opportunities of Excel.