Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s moves to prepare for the upcoming head-to-head battle with Apple and Google have sparked a flurry of media comment and industry analysis. Most of these have been highly critical, both of Microsoft and of Ballmer personally.
Few of them, however, show any signs of real strategic analysis of Microsoft’s position, or even gawking at the nature of the battle ahead. Some analysts have even preferred to ‘wait and see’, even though they are paid to make market predictions.
Commentators like Computer Weekly have reduced Microsoft’s problems to relatively trivial product issues. Others, such as the Financial Times and the Telegraph, have emphasized what they see as Microsoft’s inability to adapt to changing market circumstances, such as the recent drop in PC sales. What none of them have done is assess how Microsoft’s current global dominance influences the future evolution of smartphones and how this will affect the desktop.
Events in the world of Microsoft are currently determined by four key market forces. They are the impact of touch screen technology; the adoption of free cloud services like Skydrive; security concerns surrounding the rise of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the corporate world; and the impact of mobile work on office practices.
touch screen technology
Rob Epstein, Microsoft’s UK manager for Windows, recently recounted how his company had a booth at The Gadget Show, showcasing a range of traditional PCs and some touchscreen devices. It was, he says, the kids who went straight for touchscreen devices and the adults who picked up a mouse.
Picking up a mouse is a surprisingly easy habit to break: all it takes is a touchscreen smartphone. It was Apple that first broke our habit, followed by Google with Android. By doing this, they were taking an early position of dominance in smartphones. But inadvertently, they were doing something with an even bigger long-term impact: freeing us from the desktop altogether by making the classic Start screen redundant.
Anyone who seriously uses a touch screen will ‘get’ Windows 8. Anyone who doesn’t (and this seems to include many of the commenters mentioned above) doesn’t get it, and joins the howler monkey chorus of those who describe Windows 8 as a technological failure and Steve Ballmer as a visionless leader.
The crucial point here is that, whether they want to or not, everyone who uses a digital device will, in the near future, find themselves using a touch screen simply because the next device they buy will be based on that interface technology. Trying to buy a PC with a mouse will be like trying to buy a typewriter.
Everyone on the planet who buys a smartphone or any other screen-based device in the future will take the essential first step in wanting a smarter, more responsive interface, just like the one on their smartphone.
Crucially, too, everyone will want the interface on their phone to be the same as the interface on their PC or laptop and their laptop or tablet. There is only one established technology that answers this request and it is called Windows.
cloud technology
Having discovered that they want the same interface on all their digital devices, users will inevitably take a second step in the same direction. They will want complete and immediate synchronization of their applications and data files across all their devices.
We are currently emerging from a brief period in which commercial providers attempted to monetize cloud sync and entering an era where cloud services are universally available for free. Microsoft’s Skydrive, for example, currently has 250 million users (and, by the way, its subsidiary Skype has 633 million users, making it the second largest social network after Facebook).
It is not necessary to look very deeply to discover the reasons for this success. Skydrive and Skype are free for Windows users and are integrated with Windows devices. And, most important of all, you can set all your Windows 8 devices to automatically sync using a single account sign-in.
As I write these words, they are simultaneously available on my laptop, my Windows Phone, and my Windows tablet. Now I can walk out my office door, hop on a train, and pick up where I left off on another device, doing nothing. It is not possible to do this on anything other than Windows devices.
Bring your own device
The third major market driver is the emerging practice of Bringing Your Own Device (BYOD). There are many issues for corporate IT departments related to BYOD practices, but none more pressing than the security of corporate business data.
In the past, large companies issued secure laptops to their senior staff or provided secure software downloads for approved laptops. Now anyone can access your company email account from their own smartphone or tablet. The problem for companies is that some of these devices have serious security problems.
However, there is an operating system that is already very familiar to corporate IT departments, that has been exposed to all kinds of security threats and has already formed a defense in depth, and that is available on all kinds of digital devices. , from phones to PC: Windows. .
Android in particular has experienced some very public flaws in the security department. Bluebox Security CTO Jeff Forristal recently said, “This vulnerability… could affect any Android phone released in the last four years, or nearly 900 million devices.” This is 99 percent of Android phones in use.
Apple has relied heavily so far on the fact that so few people use Apple machines that it’s hardly worth hackers bothering to change malware.
Telecommuting and office internships
Journalists like myself have been writing about remote work for many years and there have been encouraging signs of early adoption with many different kinds of benefits for both companies and their staff. But now all the elements have finally been fully integrated so that this telework becomes a universal reality.
At least they have been fully integrated for Windows device users. The vast majority of corporate users share most of their data through Microsoft Office products like Word, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations, etc. Office documents can be read and edited directly on all Windows 8 devices, including smartphones, because Office is an integral part of these devices. For many (perhaps most) companies, this will be a no-brainer, once they’ve thought about it.
Windows Legacy Market
The market in which these changes are taking place is already dominated by Windows.
There are 1.2 billion Windows users, about a sixth of the world’s population. Most of them also use Office applications. About 60 percent of corporate users have already upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. The rest are hanging around PC World, scratching their heads and wondering what to do next. 100 million of them have purchased Windows 8 licenses. Windows Phone 8 has already overtaken Windows Phone 7 in global market share.
The next phase of the corporate Windows migration will also be an organic process, just like the last two, taking perhaps five years. But it’s almost unbelievable that anyone would seriously think that mainstream corporate computer users would even consider Android or iOS as an operating system on which to base any part of their business operations. Try to imagine Exxon, Walmart, Barclays, or Volkswagen running their businesses on Android screens and it quickly becomes obvious that thinking about anything other than Windows is crazy.
The panorama
None of these important market indicators are hidden or hard to find, which begs the question; Why exactly have so many media pundits and market analysts missed the mark or turned a blind eye to the obvious?
One explanation is that many who have written on this topic are (literally) out of touch with the technologies they describe. Unless you use touchscreen technology in a daily business routine, it’s unlikely you’ll ‘get’ Windows 8. Another is that many don’t actually do their jobs using mobile technology, and therefore experience little impact from not having Office applications available in Muevete.
When faced with the need to edit their presentation on the way to the conference or to edit and email a PDF, they simply shrug it off and take comfort in the fact that it has always been impossible. This, of course, is the classic default position of individuals and companies about to be relegated to market oblivion by smarter, more agile competitors.
One way to get a first-hand appreciation of how things are changing (as I recently did myself) is to make a personal Skype video call on a Windows Phone to a friend or family member, phone to phone, in a faraway country. When you sit on a train and talk face-to-face with your partner standing outside the White House, you “get” what the world of Windows is becoming. SF’s beloved videophone has become a reality by an unexpected route: its reach is global and it’s free.
Another reason for not seeing what the future holds in the medium term is the inability of many Western critics, especially in Europe, to appreciate the enormous production capacity and quick response of Eastern manufacturers, such as Samsung, HTC, LG and especially Huawei. the largest telecommunications manufacturer in the world. They’re all licensed Windows 8, and they’ve all gotten in the water with low-end devices, or expressed an interest in doing so.
Currently, Nokia is propping up the Windows phone market virtually single-handedly, for the same strategic reasons as Microsoft. When the sales numbers show Windows Phone taking off, these manufacturers will simply ‘Push’ on their incredible manufacturing resources, just as they did with Windows PCs and laptops when the market was there. When this will be depends on whether you are pessimistic or optimistic. Canalys says that Windows Phone will catch up with the iPhone in 2017. Other analysts believe that Windows Phone will reach parity with Apple sooner.
In many respects, there is not much difference between Microsoft, Google and Apple. But there is one. All of them are selling technology related things for profit. All of them have identified smartphones as the most lucrative consumer toy. All of them have tremendous powers of design and manufacturing. But only Microsoft has a strategy that integrates what it does with what companies and individuals need to do business, as opposed to what they want for Christmas.
They all make children’s toys. Microsoft also makes toys for adults.