Hasta la Vista

I never thought I'd find myself pitying a mega-corporation. It's happened twice now.

First was IBM, with their Luciferine fall from the top-spot in 1991. Now it's Microsoft, who seem to be making many of the same mistakes, for similar reasons.

IBM had for some years before their fall treated their customers as serfs, believing that LNA and RPG and PL1 etc. were eternal features of the computaverse: SAA was to be the One standard, the Meta-standard, that would forever bind us to the Big Blue.

Didn't happen. The more powerful IBM became, the more of a threat they posed to the jobs and status of the (still nascent) IT management in their corporate customers. If IBM was the only game in town, then IT management was redundant: there would be no important choices for them to make, so no power for them to wield. IBM became the enemy of their own customers.

I witnessed the arrogance and disdain with which IBM treated its customers while managing the internal PC division of a multi-national food company in the late '80s. "Serves them right!" I thought, when the inevitable crash came. But tens of thousands of competent people were thrown out of work in the midst of an economic recession. I would later work with several of these people, and came to understand something of the trauma the fall had inflicted on them.

IBM, the company, survived; but its pre '91 culture was dead.

Microsoft too has outgrown its original culture. It too is becoming more of a threat than a boon to its customers. Unlike my memories of the IBM debacle, M$ do seem to have an inkling of their impending doom, and they are trying to do something about it.

For example, data and system security is a major problem. So Vista has improved features in this area. Features that can work against the best interests of the end users (e.g. as described here). IE7 is thoughtlessly rolled out as a "critical" security update, causing chaos. Meanwhile Exchange, already the blackest of black boxes, gets more complex. Zero day exploits against Office multiply, to the point where M$ themselves have to recommend not using their legacy file formats until a fix is forthcoming (but when?). Meanwhile Office XML, submitted to the ECMA as a standard, reveals just how Heath Robinson those legacy format are. As yet another example, Office 2007 has some truly innovative ideas; but it looks and works somewhat differently to the current versions. Thus it will be hated by many users, purely because these differences will disrupt their personal working practices.

Microsoft has reached a size and an age where every action it takes is sub-optimal.

Microsoft, the company, will survive. It may even thrive, in different markets. But only if they learn the lesson from the coming crash of their core business ...