If you haven’t yet heard, Microsoft is in a bit of a bind lately. The consumer launch of Windows Vista (the successor to Windows XP, formerly known as “Longhorn”), has been delayed yet again until early 2007.
This is the operating system revision that was originally due in 2004, then 2005/2006 - and now, 2007. A rather depressing timeline can be viewed here.
Worse yet, the planned release has periodically jettisoned many of its major new features (such as WinFS), leaving some to wonder if by the time it ships Vista will more or less just be XP smacked around with an ugly stick a few more times and featuring hooks for a bunch of additional anti-consumer DRM restrictions.
With the recent news and more or less horizontal inclination of their stock price, pressure has been placed on Microsoft in recent days to shake things up. Even Microsoft employees and insiders have been insisting that heads should roll for the exceedingly poor way that Vista/Longhorn has been handled, and it’s hard to blame them. To their credit, it appears that Microsoft is starting to hold some of those responsible to account, though it’s hard to say if they’ve gone far enough up.
As a Mac/Unix guy, it’s tempting to just sit back and enjoy the show. Enjoying the view while watching Microsoft tripping all over itself as Apple enjoys record stock gains and successes is more than natural, right? Be that as it may, Microsoft’s health is important for Mac users as well.
The fact is that one of the main reasons why Apple turns out such consistently high quality software is because they have to fight for every scrap of marketshare they can. When you have the looming behemoth in Redmond ready to attack you in any market you may happen to do well in, you absolutely have to listen to your customers and get things right from the very start. This makes you a leaner, meaner competitor in the marketplace. Remove Microsoft from that ecosystem and Apple could very well end up becoming lazy and incompetent.
What’s funny is, in many ways this parallels Apple’s dark days in the mid 1990’s. Apple struggled to release Copland, the next generation successor to the classic Mac OS, to no avail. Previous efforts (Pink/Taligent) failed as well. Apple was, quite simply, a mess.
It ultimately took the purchase of (and eventual reverse-takeover from) NeXT and return of Steve Jobs to rid the company of its dead weight. The transition from the old Apple to the new Apple almost killed the company before it was brought back from the brink. Luckily for Microsoft, its size gives it much further to fall - buying it some time.
In order to recover, Microsoft needs to:
- Rid itself of unnecessary management - particularly those who screwed up the Longhorn/Vista development path. Flatten the hierarchy a bit and remove barriers to true innovation.
- Consider is a system like Google’s wherein engineers with good ideas have a the time and resources to explore them, and make it possible for those good ideas to become shippable features/products.
- Jettison some dead weight. Ensuring that applications written prior to Windows 95 continue to run is insane. Providing some sort of “sandbox” (as Apple did with classic Mac OS) as an add-on if you must is fine, but don’t let it compromise the end product. You don’t have to support everything, your developers will follow.
- Pick a set of APIs and stick with them. Extend if you must, but quit switching around. This sort of thinking just leads to more backward compatibility issues and confusion for developers and potential developers.
- You don’t need to release so many products. Keep the bread-winners (Windows, Office) and get rid of the marginal ones.
- For the love of god, take security seriously. If an entire thriving industry has popped up to take advantage of serious flaws in your security model, scrap the model and try something else.
- Excite us. While I am a Mac user, I do own a PC at home. Thus far I haven’t seen anything in Windows Vista that excites me - and plenty that gives me pause (again, the crippling DRM nonsense). As impressive as Mac OS X is on a technical level, there’s nothing terribly innovative about it either. Here’s your chance to show Apple up and prove that Microsoft actually has some heart left in it. Do it.
