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Making the cut

Posted on 30 Mar 2009 at 16:44

Jon Honeyball discusses the future of Microsoft following its revenue upset and reveals his concert pianist roots.

I think this shake-up will be good for Microsoft. There's been an aura of complacency emanating from the business until very recently. Despite my comment above about staff turnover in regional offices, back at base camp there's a "second wave" of employees who weren't original pirates on the Good Ship Microsoft, but who've now been there for a long time - ten years or more - and this wave has become overly comfortable.

It's also interesting to note where the cuts haven't been made. Windows is the number one priority cash cow for Microsoft, and so in the run up to the release of Windows 7 it would have been strange to see cuts in that group. Windows 7 is of the highest importance to Microsoft, and everything rests on the company's ability to keep the preinstall market trundling along despite price pressures on the product.

Staying with that vein of thought, it's worth pondering just how big a screw-up the whole netbook product category has been for Microsoft. These low-power, small-form-factor laptops have been a huge hit with the buying public because they're less cumbersome than full-sized laptops but have a good battery life and strong Wi-Fi performance. Their keyboards have been uniformly quite poor so far - small and cramped - and their displays are rather small too, but in the role of lightweight web browser or email clients they represent stunning value for money. The interesting point, though, has been the choice of OS - many netbooks are being offered with either Linux or Windows XP, and the cost difference between these can be a significant part of the overall price, which indicates that Redmond is still extracting its pound of flesh. While it would be silly to extrapolate too far too soon, Windows 7 certainly runs well on the typically specified netbook, and there's no question that this came about by design rather than by accident. Microsoft intends to try to quash the Linux desktop insurgency in the netbook arena, because it knows it simply cannot afford for these same questions to be asked about larger desktop machines.

More Windows 7

Almost despite myself I'm finding myself charmed by Windows 7, finding it to be polished, usable and a convincing product, even though it isn't finished. I'll confess that I'd somewhat lost faith in Windows as a client OS after the two great debacles of the last decade. The first of these was taking the rather good Windows 2000 Workstation and effectively throwing away all its end-user security features in the making of Windows XP Home. If you can remember that far back, XP Home was the first unified platform product that took over from the Windows 9x platform. Neutering the world-class security built into 2000 was a mistake - driven solely by the expediency of not forcing sloppy third-party software vendors to clean up their act (which makes it none the more excusable) - and we're paying for it today with the hundreds of pieces of malware, trojans and viruses released onto the internet every day. The second debacle was the release of Vista, which was incomplete, badly thought-through and a mess. After those two incidents it's clear that the Windows 7 team has much to atone for, but it looks as if they're close to pulling it off.

I'll now confess that I've already retired all my Vista VMs and installations: those machines that have reasonable specification hardware are now running Windows 7 Beta 1, which is a better platform than Vista SP1. I have one netbook running Windows 7 and that's a far from unpleasant experience (actually it's better than Windows XP Professional). It looks as if Microsoft has got it right this time - only just by the skin of its teeth.