Has M’Soft become IBM?

If you had to ask, you haven’t been coming around here much. But seriously folks, Microsoft Corp. has put a mountain of money behind its Xbox 360 videogame system and is making another big bet on its Zune digital music player. And after years of research, the company Thursday set in motion one of its most important product launches with the release of its Windows Vista operating system to corporate customers.

But despite the company's marketing muscle, army of engineers and $7.5 billion annual budget for research and development, the software titan finds itself facing real competition on more fronts than ever before. Some threats, like Google Inc.'s ad-based Internet services, are new. Others, like the resurgence of Apple Computer Inc., are not.
As the computing landscape continues to evolve, is the world's largest technology company driving innovation or racing to catch up? The Wall Street Journal Online invited a tech blogger, longtime Microsoft critic Dave Winer, to give his opinion via email, which is below.

Mr. Winer: Microsoft isn't an innovator, and never was. They are always playing catch-up, by design. That's their M.O. They describe their development approach as "chasing tail lights." They aren't interested in markets until they're worth billions, so they let others develop the markets, and have been content to catch-up. This worked well for them in the 80s and through the mid-90s, when they were a more nimble company with stock options that were attractive to bright young people, when Bill G had something to prove, and was current on the latest technology. Maybe it still does work (obviously I have doubts), but it sure isn't innovation, in any usual sense of the word.

(BTW: Dave Winer, 51, is a software developer and author of the Scripting News blog, which he has written since 1997. Mr. Winer has helped create several standards related to Web publishing, including Really Simple Syndication or RSS. He was the founder and chief executive of UserLand Software Inc., and a founder of Symantec Corp.)

Microsoft is troubled. They've grown to the size of IBM when they ran circles around them, and they behave like IBM, they even talk about themselves like IBM used to talk about themselves, showing a dangerous confidence that is very un-Microsoft. Their strength, even charm, was their lack of hubris. Gates could always see their demise, vividly and clearly, this was a picture he drew for the people of Microsoft so they would always be looking for the angle that would save them from their demise. Today they seem to believe they're as permanent as IBM thought they were in the 80s, when the conventional wisdom said that no one got fired for buying IBM. That didn't save them when the PC industry changed the rules on them, much the way the rules are being changed on Microsoft.

Further, the one thing they used to do better than most tech companies, empathize with the user, is now a weak spot. I was an exclusive Windows user myself until mid-last year, when I switched to the Macintosh, because the malware situation had become so awful on Windows. I feel Microsoft could have done something about this before it became so bad, but they didn't.

Their usual excuse for making difficult systems is their reliance on hardware [original equipment manufacturers], that's why Windows is so hard to install and manage, they say. But who can they blame for the security problems of Windows?

No one wants to change operating systems, so this has given Microsoft many years to address the problem. They boast that they have solved them in Vista. I kind of doubt they have, but I we'll have to see.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116490323676636989-HnHPKLzkyy9xKy2wnokbd2bc_bE_20071130.html