Why is Microsoft going to fuck everyone’s back?
Before anything, I’m far, far, very far to be a Microsoft fanboy. However, I lately came to (re-)discover things made by Microsoft that make me think that they are not the club of incompetent idiots that everybody tends to take them for.
By example, it’s of common knowledge that Microsoft did never invent anything and did copy all its products on its competitors. Really ? We’ll have a quick tour :
- Peedy the Talking Parrot (1995). Have you ever heard of him ? Well, it’s a parrot able to understand natural language to execute various tasks. In the video demos, you can see how you could control your music player using natural language sentences, and get a human-like answer (including expressions). Doesn’t it quite remember Apple’s Siri ?
- The Briefcase. You can put documents in it, and then synchronize them between computers. It appeared at least in Windows 95, and seriously reminds of Dropbox.
- Microsoft’s vision of Internet in… Windows 98 installer. Remember those texts that the installer displays in order to make you wait by teasing you on how awesome Windows is. If you read them with today’s eye, they mostly describe a vision of Internet where you can do e-shopping, have a virtual identity, etc. This vision is being realized, but its accomplishment is not even finished!
- Microsoft Bob. All right, this one is even worse than an EPIC fail, because they actually tried to make the computer look like all other common objects with the technology they had back in the time. You can’t fit a house in a screen. But you’ll fit all sorts of electronic devices, corresponding to Bob’s applications, inside your house. That’s exactly what ubiquitous computing is about! We’ll note that ubiquitous computing opposes itself to virtual reality, but I explained the relation I see between the two.
So, why a few 20-years old epic fails would mean that Microsoft is not staying in his grave? After all, as we do all know, they splendidly missed the Web 2.0 thing, and that’s what puts them in a “bad” position. But is it really a fault? Why did they need so long to get Internet Explorer back on tracks? Firefox probably stole 20% of their market share before they woke up. Don’t tell me that one of the largest company in the world can’t get a web browser right. Ironically enough, we’ll note that the whole Ajax/Web 2.0 hype relies on one and single thing: the XHR object, that was introduced by Microsoft.
But maybe that they see on the longer term. If no Web 3.0 is coming out (shut up you troll in the back), it’s probably because the Web 2.0 is merely a transition to something else, that is, once again, ubiquitous computing. See the smartphone/tablets delirium that’s floating around? It’s only the beginning.
And for 20 years, Microsoft did not make a move on anything. They just polished their Office pack, killed GPU for Aero to work and other superficial stuffs like that. Fundamentally, Windows 7 does nothing more than Windows 3.11, if you make abstraction of the technical side of things. But for 20 years, Microsoft Research was not shut down, and you sometimes see them surfacing. Like Surface, or all the thing’s they’ve been doing on robotics. Those things are still in the labs, because they’ve learned of their mistakes and now they’ll wait for the market to be ready before to take a product out.
The first strike: the Kinect of course. What’s next? Who knows… My belief is that they’ll use a strategy similar to Apple’s. When a new product starts to take off (like smartphones by example), they commercialize a new product more advanced than all of the others (at least, marketingly speaking).
In other words, if you’re going to do new products, watch your back, because Microsoft probably has a better one in its labs!
There is however another possiblity: Microsoft guys are indeed plain idiots, and thus Microsoft Research did never manage to get anything working, which means that in 10 years I’ll re-read this post and roll on the floor laughing to be so wrong. Time will tell :)
