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.

New Yahoo?

I suppose I should have an opinion on Yahoo bringing in Marissa Mayer to rescue it from (popular and profitable) non-entity.

Frankly I have no real insight. But here's the golden rule. You can't be a great technology company and a great media / content company at the same time. (Unless you are Nintendo, and then you're really just a great media company that understands technology well enough not to let it get the upper hand.)

Yahoo has, for as long as it's worth anyone remembering, been a media company. In fact it's been an OK media company, with lots of traffic and a respectable profit. It's been run as a media company, by media people. And its only real problem is that it's been judged and found wanting against the tech. giants of our age.


So, it's never cared about its geeks. It dabbles with technology in only a lacklustre way. And it's squandered some really great tech. acquisitions.

But suddenly, it wants to be a tech. company after all???


How is that going to work? Can Mayer do a 180 degree turn? Re-inspire the geeks who already work there? Bring in more talent? What will happen to all the media people? How will Mayer manage to keep them happy if she explicitly tries to turn Yahoo into a tech. culture? Or, will she fire them (as Marc Andreesen advises)? Done badly, this could be a disaster, with Yahoo ripping itself to pieces as it tries to slam into reverse.

Alternatively, if Mayer is really clever, she may figure out how to keep running Yahoo as a media company while doing something exciting with it. Like Nintendo, Yahoo *could* become a media company that understands technology well enough to use it properly.

Here are a few random ideas :

1) Yahoo is nowhere in mobile. It's never going to own a platform, a crucial service or make extraordinary hardware. Give it up. Yahoo mobile apps are simply a necessary cost of keeping its media channels in play.

BUT Yahoo, as a brand, *does* have a chance with TV. None of the tech. giants have successfully colonised TV yet. It's still an open field. Yahoo's brand, content, sales-force and in-house media know-how give it a shot at the smart TV market. It's not clear what plans Yahoo have for smart TV. Do they have an OS for it? Well, if not, here's a thought : partner with Ubuntu who do have a slick and robust operating system and interface for TV but are unlikely to make much headway with it by themselves.  A combination of Ubuntu's technological maturity with Yahoo's brand and audience (including its sports channel, partnerships with gaming companies etc.) could make up a compelling package for third-party TV manufacturers.

Seriously. No-one in the world really wants a "Google TV" or a "Microsoft TV". These brands have no connection with what anyone thinks of when they think of TV. The Yahoo brand has a great advantage here because people do recognise it as a *content* brand. A news, sport, entertainment portal. Which is what smart TV is aspiring to become.

2)  AOL made a play to be a great web media company in its acquisitions of Weblogs Inc., TechCrunch and The Huffington Post. Much has gone wrong, and some of the biggest and smartest personalities have left. Did that signal the idea was fundamentally flawed or just that the chemistry didn't work out that time? Might it be worth, for example, Yahoo buying Mahalo to bring Jason Calacanis into the fold?

3) More than that, online education is an area which is continuing to grow. Yahoo Answers is a massively popular site. But compared to Stack Overflow or Quora is looking decidedly old and unloved. What could Answers become if paired with Mahalo and put under Calacanis's influence and ambition?

(Aside : I would have suggested Yahoo go for Instructables too, but I just discovered that they were bought by Autodesk : a move I consider very sensible. That leaves another cute Squid-Labs offshoot : HowToons that could work in a Yahoo context.)

4) Perhaps what Yahoo! needs is a big statement. Something cool. Hardware, because hardware is what makes big statements. Apple had the iPhone. Microsoft had Kinect. Google is going with the glasses. Yahoo have the money to buy themselves into this game. So what about Parrot? Drones are coming, and Parrot have the leading consumer drone platform. AR Drones would get Yahoo into robotics. Into augmented reality. Would give it a noteworthy gaming / entertainment platform. Would inspire geek lust. Etc. And Parrot + a successful push into TV would open up an interesting home automation front.

5) Many people have commented on the sad decline of Flickr under Yahoo. Not sure there's much more to say, except, I'm very surprised that Flickr is not better represented on the Yahoo home-page. The Flickr blog has some wonderful pictures. I'm not sure why Yahoo don't promote Flickr and Flickr photographers on its front page.

6) OK. Showing my prejudice here. The only Yahoo service I actually use is Pipes. It's good, but again, its potential feels underdeveloped.

So let's be bold for a second. Pipes is the great, philosophical, something-or-other of our age. The shift we think of from web 1.0 to web 2.0. The move to social. To apps. The coming of Netocracy. These are all, fundamentally, about the shift from managing stocks to managing flows. Most people are now drowning in the deluge that floods through Twitter, G+ and the Facebook Wall. Even Email has never really been conquered. We are *desperate* for tools to manage our flows. And Pipes, one of Yahoo's nerdiest, most out-of-place, quirks of a service is potentially the solution. If it can, paradoxically, be both professionalised and made usable by the wider base of Yahoo members.

How could Pipes be professionalised?

a) The UI is cute. But programmers are never going to work in that kind of environment. Pipes should offer a plain text alternative. A simple, "little language" to define and edit piping networks. Have an editor in the browser. Allow the scripts to be accessed via Git (and so shared on GitHub). Provide syntax colourers for popular offline editors like Eclipse and Emacs. Make sure programmers can think of Pipes as quick to write and convenient to work with.

b) Pipes should be fast, and a cloud service. By which I mean, it should be possible to host a Piping network on a fast server and pay for it. Like Amazon AWS and Google App. Engine.

c) Pipes should talk to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Status.net, Yammer, RSSCloud. Maybe even AMQP.


d) Most important though, Pipes should be integrated with Yahoo mail. You should be able to use it, inside Yahoo mail to filter your incoming messages, send auto-replies, create alerts and summaries etc.


e) You should be able to embed a Pipes network within an external site. In fact, it should be possible for a third-party to build a product such as RSSGraffiti on top of Pipes. And build it in an afternoon.


At the same time, how can Pipes be made more accessible?

a) The most popular rival to Pipes is probably http://ifttt.com/wtf . If I was running the Yahoo Pipes strategy I'd look seriously at whether we could buy it or hire its people. At the very least we'd be pitching Pipes as a rival to it and offering similar functionality on the same engine.

b) Remember the push into education I suggested? Pipes could gain a more child-friendly UI putting it in competition with MIT Scratch and Google Blockly. Promoted in a "learn to program" course, via Yahoo's own kids / study zone it could gain some traction in schools.


Does the data-flow model of Pipes lend itself to more general programming tasks? Sure if you look at the use of Max/MSP and PD for music or VVVV for graphics. And, I'd argue that, building piping networks is likely to be an increasingly important metaphor for programming in the worlds of the cloud and device swarm.


Imagine, for a second, Yahoo teaching kids to create their own VVVV-style eye-candy on large-screen Yahoo branded TVs through a Pipes-like UI as taught by a series of lessons on the study zone. Imagine those skills then being useful for mashing up websites, business process modelling, etc.

c) An iPad app. Multi-touch is a great interface to compose piping networks.

7) Here is an outstanding question I'm trying to make up my mind about. Does Yahoo need its own browser? A long time ago I thought it absurd that Microsoft wasted its money and energy on a browser, when the future belonged to web-standards. More recently we've seen how important it is for would-be giants to have their own browsers. They give you the chance to push web-standards the way you'd like them to go. Or at least vote for the tentative standards you'd really like to see. Of course, a Yahoo browser would be most likely built on WebKit, just as Apple's and Google's are. But it might still be worth having. 


Update : Bill Seitz comments : http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2012-07-16-MayerNewYahooCeo

Finally Microsoft does something exciting. Buys Skype.

You know, I really thought it was going to be Facebook that bought Skype. Perhaps they couldn't afford it.

Anyway, this is really the first good big move Microsoft have made on the internet since buying Hotmail. Cringley thinks it's purely defensive. And it might be, but he makes a good case that even that's a good (or necessary) idea.

But it could be so much more. If M$ don't fuck it up.

Here are a couple of observations :

1) Skype is a great brand.

I always thought that M$ had a good brand in Hotmail, but they proceeded to throw it away, continually trying to turn it into MSN / Windows / Live blah whatever. People still call it Hotmail. They still use that in the address, but M$ did everything they could to confuse and destroy the "Hot" brand.

It will be ULTRA idiotic of them to try to rename Skype as LivePhone or MSN Talk or something. I mean, really, really, really, really dumb.

Contrariwise, Skype is much better brand than anything else M$ has when it comes to cool contemporary internet stuff. Other technologies that M$ are developing could well be moved under the Skype name. For example ...

2) Skype is a social network.

It really is.

Like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And unlike either Google, Apple or any of Microsoft's previous efforts, Skype is a pretty meaningful "social graph" which can be used for all kinds of interesting experiments in social communication.

At the moment, Skype is very much focussed on synchronous chat / phone call. But it would not be hard at all to add asynchronous capabilities to the client. Some kind of pub-sub, status, wall. Allow Skype users to tag their contacts, or group them into themed lists. And then to watch the posts from a particular list. Let them add photos, links, video. I think within 6 - 8 months M$ could build a fairly plausible and compelling rival to Twitter. Especially if they allowed groups to create private workspaces and channels.

In fact, if I ran Microsoft (here it comes ...) here's exactly what I'd do. Find two or three great programmers and UX designers who are hungry to do something new. Pay Dave Winer to go and talk to them about instant outlining. Pay someone from Google's Wave project to go and talk to them about what they hoped for from it, and what went wrong. Get the designers to mock up some forward looking ideas about how a future Skype client could incorporate asynchronous communication, "narrating your work", private tweet streams, etc.

3) Skype is collaborative work

"Skype" is what people in business say when they mean "conference call".

And Skype could be another chance for M$ to get into collaborative work. Word and Excel need to support shared editing of documents. And it needs to be easy to understand. So bundle the Skype client into Office. (Not exclusively, of course). And have a menu option on Word and Excel saying "Share this document via Skype" which immediately allows you to invite skype contacts to work on a document together.

What if they don't have Office? Well, the Skype client should at least have the free document viewer built into it so that they can follow what you're doing. (I'd go further, why not allow some restricted editing facilities? And yes, this should run everywhere the Skype client runs, ie. Mac, Linux, iOS etc.)

More importantly, hello? App Stores! Have a one click "buy and install Office" built into the Windows Skype client. Make it all work smoothly.

4) Skype is a subscription service

On the subject of one-click buying, remember that Skype is a paid relationship / service. (And likely they already have the user's credit-card number.)

Apple had one of those with iTunes, and look how that worked out for them. Amazon has one, and it's managed to take the Amazon account from selling books to selling virtual servers on AWS. And it's why Amazon are a serious contender to rival Google's App Store for Android. Being able to take people's money easily is an amazingly valuable asset that none of the other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) have. Even Google are struggling with this problem.

Get creative here!

5) Skype and Windows Phone

Yes, build Skype into Windows Phone. But I'd go further.

I'd immediately offer a discount on Windows Phone contracts to anyone who's put money into a SkypeOut account. It's a way of paying people to use WP7 that a) might actually encourage some undecideds but b) importantly, doesn't look (too) desperate - it is, after all, a reward for buying into the whole M$ ecosystem. Go further, a single plan for renting a Windows Phone AND SkypeOut calls.

6) More brand extension

SkypePad : it just sounds a hell of a lot funkier than Windows 8 Tablet Edition doesn't it?

Skype 360 : better than RoundTable? (Don't even start me on "Unified Communications"!)

You get the idea ...

Not updating this blog much. I've taken some time to go back to college, do art and play with a bunch of toys that I've wanted to try for a while. Frankly, my only real thinking about "Platform Wars" happens when I
read ZDNet ... so you might as well get the stories direct from them.

I did wonder whether I should retire this blog entirely. But I know that although I sometimes go on hiatus on some topics, I usually find myself getting interested in them again at some point. So consider this blog hibernating (rather than dead).

However, here's a comment I posted to a mailing list discussion a couple of weeks ago about the opportunities for LinkedIn. Nothing new to regular readers here. But I realise it deserves a permanent home here.

---

For years I've been asserting that the key for social networks to make
money is to enable their members to form groups that actually DO
things together. And to earn revenue as enablers of doing things.

In a sense, Groupon is a great step forward although a) it doesn't
come out of an existing social network, and b) it seems like Groupon
finds the deals itself rather than lets members find them.

If I ran a network like Facebook I'd add "one click" Kickstarter-like
functionality so that organisers of any event could instantly set up
an account to collect donations, or an escrow account to collect money
for things that only happen if a threshold is reached. In the long
run, Facebook's 500 million members are going to be more effective at
finding Groupon-like deals than Groupon's paid staff.

In the case of LinkedIn, it's slightly trickier, because the essence
of LinkedIn is to NOT be Facebook. By which I mean, LinkedIn's
strength is that it works as as low-traffic, low frequency site for
"serious" uses (as opposed to the fripperies of Facebook). You can't
expect LinkedIn users to be on the site every day (or even every
week).

Here's a personal perspective. I'm an artist / musician and software
developer. I've been paid to write music for modern dance productions;
and I've been paid to write stock-control software to manage
warehouses. And, of course, depending on what kind of gig I'm applying
for, I may want to send a very different CV of my recent projects and
achievements. I basically keep two Word files and manually keep them
up-to-date and in sync. Now what I'd love LinkedIn to do for me would
be to let me create richer CVs with detailed *tagged* sections and let
me generate printable docs based on a selection of tags. Eg. if I'm
applying for an exhibition I want to include five recent bits of
web-art I've done and links to a YouTube channel. But won't bother
mentioning the e-commerce system I built in Perl all those years ago.
For a different potential employer, I may like to generate the
opposite.

I probably wouldn't pay directly for that functionality alone. But I
would spend more time on the site if it was a full CV management
solution. And I'd accept targetted advertising. (LinkedIn would, of
course, have a lot more data about me too, that it could use for
targetting.)

Similarly, people aren't changing jobs every day, but freelancers
*are* pitching for jobs every month. I'm not saying that LinkedIn want
to buy oDesk or should copy it directly. But I am saying that the
growth opportunities for a "professional oriented" social utility will
include a lot more support for people doing short term contracts. And
yes, that means helping people manage outsourcing to freelancers
around the world, letting people manage more sophisticated CVs and
portfolios, keeping a reputation system, facilitating international
payments etc. etc.

LinkedIn still thinks we do a series of "one job after another" rather
than have a portfolio of different jobs, freelance contracts, non-paid
activites etc. which overlap in time. I went back to college this
year, and yet I can't tell LinkedIn that I'm in full time education
again and therefore not to show my most recent paid job as if it's my
current one. The biggest improvement they could make is to keep the
seriousness (ie. don't try to copy Facebook) but to understand that
work is evolving and to help members track and navigate their
trajectory through this increasingly complex space.

I'm asking, over on Quora :

In my current search for a new laptop I keep finding what seem to be surprising lacks in the market.

In particular, how come it's 2010 and overt support for Linux from major laptop manufacturers is still non-existent?

It occurs to me, that even if they refuse to supply linux pre-installed, any major laptop maker could at least afford to hire a couple of linux geeks to a) try to get linux working on each of their models, b) blog about the experience (ie. what did they have to do? what drivers needed recompiling? where do you get them? etc.)

As far as I can see, none of the major suppliers : Dell, HP, Sony, Samsung, Asus, Toshiba etc. have anything like a URL ( linux-geeks.dell.com etc.) where you can go and get information about running linux on their machines.

The more I think about it, that absence is pretty amazing. Is there really NO market advantage in supporting Linux users of your machines? Are Microsoft (not so) subtly discouraging them?

So, the question part :

- are any PC makers doing interesting things to support Linux on their hardware (and I just didn't notice)?

- if not, why not? What blind-spots are preventing them grabbing a bit of competitive advantage this way?

As far as I can see, the only real hope for Microsoft in the smartphone market is to buy RIM (Blackberry).

There is no pure software market in selling mobile operating systems. Just as there wasn't in selling operating systems for web-servers.

As with web-servers, the only os likely to gain traction is one which is effectively free like Android.

Or you make your own handsets.

Buying Blackberry would give M$ a handset manufacturer, a valuable enterprise brand, and the headache of merging its engineers and software with RIM's. Nevertheless, I suspect that the latter is a price worth paying for the first two.

Ideally, forget the "Windows Phone" brand and concentrate on using M$ muscle to promote the Blackberry with enterprises, carriers, retailers etc. Then merge specific interesting new M$ technologies, apps, UI innovations, engineering teams into Blackberry.

Won't happen, of course, as long as the "cult of Windows" remains dominant at M$.

Interesting, ZDNet has an article about Debian / Ubuntu package management.

There are some interesting comments about why this wouldn't work in the Windows ecosystem. They're good arguments, but I think Apple just proved that a closely vetted app-store *does* work.

So, sure, an official M$ app-store wouldn't be the only place you could get Windows apps. Maybe Microsoft would only certify a handful of them given that there's an implied approval. Maybe M$ would have to be able to see the source-code and compile it themselves as part of their approval process. Nevertheless I think the app-store model would be incredibly valuable to Microsoft.

Question : Why the hell don't Microsoft have an app-store?

I don't mean why they haven't built an entirely new distribution network for some projected new Windows mobile phone operating system. I mean, why didn't Windows 7 Desktop launch with a complete "give us your credit card number and we automatically install, manage, upgrade everything for you automatically" sort of thing?

I had managed applications from a central repository of packages on my Debian system in 2001. I have it seamlessly on Ubuntu (and have had for a good while). When Apple came along and showed the world that owning an app-store was a great business to be in, all the other mobile providers rushed in and started building their own.

What M$ could have done, is set a few engineers building something similar, for integration with Windows 7. I don't mean a website, I mean something more like win-get (or Debian's apt-get).

I'm installing software on my wife's new Windows 7 laptop today, and I'm amazed, now I come to think about it, that there's no "buy apps" option under the Windows Start button, right next to the list of already installed applications. Why is there no search-box built into Windows to let me find Microsoft-approved 3rd party applications to buy?

Think what a feature this could have been for Windows 7. How it would have driven corporates to upgrade (too expensive to pay our own IT people to install software, better to pay for the new Windows and let Microsoft sort it out.) How it would have energized the MicroISVs and lone developers to continue to invest their energy in Windows (rather than start dabbling on Android and iOS). How it would have given M$ a cut of all the software sold in the Windows eco-system.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like it would have been a good idea, and the more the absence of an app-store in Windows 7 seems like an extraordinary oversight. Was one planned but not finished in time? Was Microsoft too scared of potential legal implications to do with competition? Did they just slip up?

I've long argued that Microsoft are a company built around a profound and fundamental belief : that it was possible to be a pure software company and allow someone else to produce commodity hardware.

Microsoft's DNA is to be a maker and seller of software qua product but not of hardware and not a provider of services.

This was an idea that served them well during the 80s and the explosion of the microcomputer, but served them badly in the 90s during the rise of the internet and its twin correlates : free software and software as a service.

Apple, by contrast, have always been a hardware / software company; which put them at a disadvantage in the 80s and 90s, but proved to be surprisingly fit when they adapted their "full stack" philosophy to become a hardware / software / service company in the last decade (starting with the ipod / itunes / itunes store ecology and moving on to the iphone / ipad etc.)

Anyway, I always thought that, due to free software, and software-as-a-service, the vision of a pure software company was on the wrong side of history.

Today I just had an intriguing thought. What if I was wrong? What if Microsoft's big vision wasn't out-of-date as I supposed? What if it were possible to thrive as a pure software company?

What if the only problem was Microsoft's bad execution? Or if, from their dominant position, Microsoft had come to believe that their role was to capture and dominate platforms, and to extract rent from them? That it was their birthright to own platforms?

That belief has proven to be spectacularly wrong. What if M$ did try to live according to their DNA? And did try to be a pure software company in 2010?

What would they look like?

Well, they would support all important platforms. They wouldn't worry about *owning* platforms, just selling software to take advantage of them. The important platforms today are the web, Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Linux, Facebook, Twitter etc. So if M$ were true to their DNA they'd start producing apps. for these platforms.

When did you last see M$ producing a popular iPhone or iPad app? Or a killer game on Facebook? Or a great Twitter client? Or making sure that Office and Sharepoint and IE and IIS ran on Linux?

If you do start seeing this, then you might start to have some hope for them. That maybe they have started to rediscover their true nature.

After HP buys Palm, some fantasy matchmaking :

Adobe and Microsoft. If Apple keeps hammering at Flash then maybe Adobe has to cuddle up somewhere. What Adobe and Microsoft have in common is that they're good old-fashioned desktop application companies and don't really know how to be anything else. The combination, if not exciting, is at least comfortably compatible.

OTOH, here's what would be exciting : Adobe and Behance. (or Adobe and DesignOutpost etc.)

Apple are dominating markets for creative work through iTunes and the app-store. They're gunning for the rest of it with the iPad as book / magazine / news market as well.

Adobe is the only other brand with such a high profile among creative professionals. It should ask itself whether it's in the business of providing commodity video stream plugins, or whether it's really in the business of helping creative people to produce great work, to distribute that work to their audience, and to get paid.

Why is Adobe not running the most popular site for web and print designers to host their portfolios? Why can I not go to an Adobe site to find a freelancer? (And why are Adobe not a clip-art company? A photo-agency? A talent agency for the kind of people who work on Avatar?)

Adobe is never likely to compete directly with Facebook. But the world is going to get more niche and specialist networks. Adobe ought to grow a presence there; one that will, in turn, help it to understand the creative community it caters to.

Even better, what about Adobe and Ponoko? The future for creatives is to go beyond traditional print / video / web design and move into making : physical objects, product design, smart-materials, desktop manufacturing, etc.

Adobe started as the company that made a programming language to drive laser printers. Where is the programming language to drive RepRaps and the coming breed of 3D printers? Where's the design software for the art school student that wants to design printable furniture? Or jewellery?

Update : Adobe and Behance? It happened!

I wonder how much it would cost to buy Tribe.net ?

If I was a magic money fairy - as opposed to an impoverished programmer - I'd try to find a way to merge Tribe with Behance and DesignOutpost

Behance has a great look and a nice angle of being not only a LinkedIn style directory, but also a kind Getting Things Done consultant, for the "Creative Class".

But it gives little sense of a community or real artistic "scene".

OTOH, Tribe has that in spades. Tribe used to be a fantastic place to have good discussions ... as it has lost attention to the other YASNS, the debates have died out a bit, sadly. But there's no doubt that members feel they're part of something ... a bohemian, creative, tolerant, underground, burner, new age, spiritual, sexually experimental movement.

DesignOutpost is a market for hiring creative people (graphic and sound-designers, web developers etc.) to work in a radically open way. Yet, its profiles are far behind those of Behance or Tribe.

In the talk of consolidation of the YASNS (particularly the dance of M$ and Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace) the motive is simply the lumpen aggregation of eyeballs for advertisers.

But the real as-yet-unlocked value of YASNS is to enable groups to *do* things together. Markets from DesignOutpost to Etsy to Rentacoder are providing one way for people to work together. The interesting thing about my fantasy merger is not the aggregation of eyeballs but the real (am I really, gonna use this word? OMFG! guess I am, take cover) synergy of the activities or communities.

A real social network and creative community which was also a good portfolio manager AND market could create value in a way unimagined by the advertising model of YASNS.

Update 2011 : Some more thoughts on YASN monetization.

Yahoo should be broken up. End of story.

There are great products inside Yahoo, eg. Flickr. Some big services which are world-beaters.

The problem is, anyone big enough to buy Yahoo outright (like Google or M$) already has their own version of a lot of these ... and would have to start killing off either their own or Yahoo's.

If Yahoo isn't big or coherent enough to survive on its own, then the next best thing is to blow itself up into a number of higher value independent units. Let each go out and thrive, die or get bought on its own merits.

...

Unless ... of course ...

what was Cringely saying again, about Apple wanting to be in the media distribution game?

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.