Ready to Count Out Microsoft? Economics Is Against It
There are a lot of people both inside the industry and out that don't like Microsoft. As in hate Microsoft. I've seen users who can't stand things going wrong and developers who felt that the company had done them wrong. The recent patent battles the company has found itself in are examples of how the anger, often valid and understandable, explodes. And that happens, but there are a lot of people who like to predict the momentary end of the behemoth. It's a harmless outlet, unless your business involves technology, in which case it's a potential strategy death wish.
I ran across an article about why CIOs are saying no to officially supporting Macs. Yes, Apple's market share has grown some, though when you're in the eight percent range, the share is still small. But the gain is largely in the consumer and small business realm.
But the business world remains immune to the pull of Apple's hardware, with few - if any - workers in most companies using anything other than the classic Wintel combination, in spite of demand for alternative desktop options from staff.I understand that some companies use Macs throughout. When I was a contributing editor for MacWEEK, I regularly wrote about the issues that came up in larger companies using a significant portion of Macs. But even back in the 90s, the examples came off a well-defined list of companies known to use the machines, and even many of the companies were phasing out Macs.
It's not some religious bias, unless you're talking about the Cult of the Budget. Hardware is more expensive, there is a far smaller selection of third-party software, and the cost of shifting a company over is enormous. It's all practicality. You can see the same effect with Microsoft itself -- because new versions of Windows, for example, face the same problem. There's always a delay in upgrading OS versions for corporations. Why? It costs money, makes an unstable mess of Work As Usual, increases Panicked Calls to the Help Desk, and needs a lot of work. Rarely do the benefits of the change so overwhelm the costs that making the switch becomes an easy decision, and the IT departments do consider such things. Even when fanboys and vendor shills slap their heads in amazement that the departmental tools just don't get it, they likely do. They simply don't see enough payback for wholesale migration.
This is the marketing power of inertia, and it's why Microsoft has stayed on top of its particular game. Switching is far harder than most vendors courting users like to admit, although all the big vendors know and depend on it. And yet, Microsoft is in an increasingly dangerous position these days, because suddenly making a shift in a browser-and-cloud environment gets much easier.
No, the desktop doesn't go away for years, because you have to run the browser on something, and then you're back to what might make the switch cost effective, because there are all thousands, or tens of thousands, of machines in a big enterprise. And even though real potential exists in smartphones, you're not going to see people staring at a 4- or 5-inch screen at their desks.
Where Microsoft will eventually get hurt, though, is in a few areas. When you can run things out of a browser, then you probably don't need to keep updating the OS. And it's now possible to challenge Microsoft's dominance in key application areas. The danger to them there isn't Google Apps, but IBM-hosted email, because there's a company that understands enterprise customers, and enterprises have the connectivity bandwidth to make access to remotely hosted services a reality. And once email is cracked, I think the rest of the app stack can't be all that far behind, particularly as the upcoming generations of mobile devices aren't going to have the muscle to install the likes of Office. Anyone for starting a rumor about IBM buying a company like Zoho? It would make a whole lot of strategic sense.
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