MICROSOFT & THE FUTURE OF TECH
In a time when Google and Apple are going great guns, it is anathema to even think of, let alone propagate a third company sweeping in and staking its claim on dominating the global computing/tablet/mobile space.
Yet, if anyone is poised and equipped to do so, it will have to be Bill Gates’ technology giant.
Given the moves that they are making, I am convinced that this is the ultimate play by Microsoft to change the landscape of the market over the next few years…and I am cautiously optimistic that they will succeed.
The reason simply stated… is as below.
With the advent of smartphones and tablets, one is increasingly moving to a lifestyle that incorporates having all three devices i.e. phone, tablet and computers in your daily interface. Using the three devices across platforms leads to fragmentation and the need to synchronize and manage information between the devices.
Now imagine having a laptop with all your content, office software, mails, multimedia, and even apps downloaded and installed from the ‘marketplace’. Imagine being able to pluck out the screen and carry it around separately as a tablet…then imagine syncing your phone with this computer/tablet and replicating the experience, content and apps on the phone as well.
Through its 8th iteration MS has doubled down on the seamless integration of the three pillars of your computing experience.
At present there are only two companies which are in a position to provide this solution…Microsoft and Apple. Google unfortunately doesn’t make the cut as it may have superior offerings in the mobile and tablet space, but it does not have a credible option in the computing OS space, nor have its attempts to market products targeting office suite made any headway.
Apple is also working on this premise by integrating the Ipad, Iphone and Ipod through iTunes. However their computing platform is far from being integrated with the mobile platform. Last, but certainly not the least, it’s computing platform comes nowhere close to matching the proliferation of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, Office suite and business enterprise products such as Exchange, Sharepoint and network solutions.
MS has expended great amount of energies and money (of course) in this gamble…going back to the drawing board and starting on its mobile platform from scratch, at the expense of losing loyal smartphone customer base to Android and iOS. The exercise has taken its time, but is slowly resulting into a mature operating system which should find its feet by the 3rd (namely version 9) iteration, although version 8 does come close.
In effect, with the onset of 2014/15, you should see the result of Microsoft’s efforts having matured and the experience of unified computers, tablets and smartphones, seamlessly integrated in terms of their content through MS Skydrive, in terms of email and PIM through Outlook.com, in terms of apps through Windows marketplace…this, according to me should be the point of inflexion…from where MS would start gaining market share and over a period of 2-3 years become the dominant player in the global market.
Global marketing research firm IDC also sees this directional shift in the market share as per its projections depicted in this chart…
But more importantly… what will drive this change is the user experience being brought in by MS in its latest offerings…its unparallelled in its fluidity and works perfectly (reminding you of when Google search first came up in the search engine space dominated by tired laggards like Altavista, Yahoo etc). If you want a real taste of what MS is doing and just why it is so much better…you need to definitely try out their email solution at Outlook. com, their cloud solution i.e. Skydrive (which integrates with Microsoft Office) and their mobile platform Windows 8 (perhaps when Nokia 920 comes out).
Just seeing how Outlook. com works would convince you regarding the direction of the design language MS has adopted and just why this does have the potential to be a market beater!!!
© 2012 Anshuman Khanna (www.anshumankhanna.in)