Has Microsoft reached its “sell by” date? Has the meteoric rise and rise of the company reached a peak, with the prospect of a slippery downward slide making Microsoft go beyond aggressive competition – into monopolistic, unfairly competitive and arrogan t business practices? Some early warning signals are appearing.
But, let me lay my cards on the table: I’m really a Microserf. Most of the software I use personally is made by Microsoft, and in the course of my professional work I have been involved in decision-making and implementation with scores of organisations c onverting from non-Microsoft (WordPerfect, Novell, Unix, and so forth) to Microsoft software.
But, like many in the information technology industry, I engage in my share of Microsoft-watching. Until recently there were few signs of a downward slide, and there is no doubt that the company is still strong.
It responded with astonishing alacrity to the challenge of the Internet, admitting its own misreading of the phenomenon and then turning every business activity on its head in little more than a year, becoming an Internet champion where it had been caugh t with its head in the sand. But now I see practical, on-the-ground evidence of a company becoming the victim of its own success. Interestingly, e ven Microsoft acknowledges a drop in their approval ratings.
“The number of people who are enthusiastic about the products and the company has taken a dip,” said top Microsoft marketing man and executive vice-president Steve Ballmer in January this year.
Hauled before the United States Senate hearings on competition in the software industry earlier this month, Bill Gates reiterated that Microsoft’s business is “writing great software” and strongly denied the company was engaging in anti-competitive or mo nopolistic business practices.
Lately I’ve noted a decline in the quality of some of Microsoft’s flagship products.
l Microsoft Office 97 is in my experience less reliable than its predecessors, while only delivering marginal new benefits. Admittedly, Word and Excel 95 were hard acts to follow – I would definitely agree with Gates that these products qualified as “gre at software” – but the PR fanfare hailing the 1997 versions as the “greatest release in six years” left a sour taste in my mouth. It soured furthe r when I discovered that the footnote bug in Word (it can go crazy once you have more than about a dozen lines of footnote text on a single page) has been in existence since Version 2 and still has not been fixed!
The switch to new file formats making Office 97 files incompatible with Office 95 has felt high-handed and left many users feeling forced to upgrade for no good reason. Not what one associates with “great software”.
l Microsoft FrontPage promises – and to some extent delivers – Web publishing with almost the same ease we’ve come to expect from plain old paper printing. But in doing so it has been remarkably cavalier with the creations of its users. If you add some code of your own to a Web page to make it do something FrontPage doesn’t offer, next time you open the page in FrontPage it will simply alter and often remove your code without comment or warning. It’s a concrete example of being told by Microsoft, “Do it our way or don’t do it at all.”
Gates also told the US Senate that “the great thing about Windows is that it works with an extremely broad range of hardware and enables literally tens of thousands of different software products to work together”. Another statement that has a lot of tru th in it. But Microsoft has been tightening the screws on the very interoperability of its software that brought the company its fame and glory.
l Office 97 has a shockingly limited range of conversion options to assist users who wish to share files with heretics who don’t use Microsoft software. A year later Word 97 still has no converter for Lotus WordPro, a member of one of the top three offic e suites on the market. And I have noted a marked decline in the quality of Word’s conversion of WordPerfect documents from the earlier days where one felt Word saw WordPerfect as a worthy competitor and made every effort to ease the path of those who wished to convert to Word.
l At the PC network level, Windows NT has successfully challenged the previously unquestioned supremacy of Novell NetWare. However, the result of this success is that huge numbers of enthusiastic users of Microsoft products are living with hybrid environ ments mixing NT servers with NetWare servers. And heaven help you if you ask Microsoft to assist with an integration issue involving a non-Microso ft product. It was not always like this.
Microsoft has reached its supreme position through an approach known as “embrace and crush” – the outcome of which has in the past assisted many users to shift from competing products to Microsoft. So I’ve found in the past, for example, that Microsoft s ervers work much better with Novell servers than vice versa. But lately the door seems to have shut on peaceful coexistence – a move from embracin g the opposition to crushing it – and woe betide any poor consumer who happens to use a mixture of Microsoft products and those of its opposition.