IBM Chides Microsoft Over Poor Roadmap Directions

(MoneyWatch)  IBM is still trying to take advantage of Microsoft's stumbles with Vista in the hopes that customer confusion results in defection to IBM platforms and applications.

The most recent evidence of this is a posting by IBM blogger extraordinaire Ed Brill (a sometimes commenter on this blog) in which he takes Microsoft to task for encouraging customers to start testing Windows 7 rather than continue evaluating Vista.

Never underestimate Microsoft's willingness to criticize current versions of its products in an attempt to convince you to move to new ones...funny that they're never this honest when those products first ship. Too bad it takes them years to come clean.

Brill was picking up on an article in Network World that noted, rather tartly, that Microsoft's recent messaging is a "marked change from Microsoft's typical straddling act in which users are rarely publicly encouraged to abandon one upgrade plan for the impending release of the new version of a product."

What Brill fails to mention is that the main thrust of the article is that Microsoft is trying to help customers cope with an avalanche of new products slated to come out in the next seven to twelve months, and quotes Top Dog analyst Karen Hobert as saying, that Microsoft "'is being brutally honest.'"

I asked Microsoft for a reaction and received a statement that laid out its advice more clearly, if drily:

"Windows 7 will not make significant architectural changes over Windows Vista... [so] we expect that Windows 7 will run most if not all applications that run on Windows Vista... the transition to Windows 7 should be much more straightforward if they move to Windows Vista in the interim."

This may seem like a skirmish for the sake of skirmishing, but the truth is that IBM is doing whatever it can to derail new Microsoft deployments at a particularly important time. Microsoft is in the midst of a huge product upgrade cycle that could make the 2007 introductions of Vista and Office 2007 pale by comparison. Right now is also when customers are considering whether or not to commit to those upgrades and the infamous enterprise agreements that come with them. Microsoft is also hoping its new release of the SharePoint collaboration server is the coup de grace for IBM's Lotus Sametime collaboration suite -- something that IBM has been fighting tooth and blog post.