The Empire has fallen. Yes, that is a radical statement when referring one of the few truly dominant companies of the computer age, but Microsoft appeared at SXSW as a directionless, poorly orchestrated mass of unrelated products. More than their marketing efforts though, the truer measure was their complete absence from the conversation.
In presentations, except their own sponsored speakers, in the hallways of the Austin Convention Center, and among those of us that observe and comment on this industry, Microsoft was completely missing. The people that brought you Bob and Zune and powered Bill Gates to victory in the richest man in the world pageants of the 1990s are now an afterthought. They have serious work to do before they capture the imagination of the world’s most talented recruits, before they pre-sell millions of units of a new product based on reputation alone and before they turn core services into a widely used verb. Yes, that is the case for Apple and Google, and they now perceived as now. Microsoft? They now perceived as then, as IBM before them.
I have no stake in this opinion, and I own no stock of the above mentioned firms, dammit. But as someone that started my career as a Microsoft assimilator - converting Novell networks to the new game in town and informing hapless NetWare geeks the train has left the station with their gig - I was struck by how the cycle seemed complete. Microsoft products are now apologized for - my office makes me use this or that - and its clear their old cash cows - Office, Windows - are under attack from firms large and small. In the new world order of technology, people have is corporate computing. A company built on brutal licensing deals and copycat design cannot grow in this environment.
Microsoft doesn’t do their own products, when those products are new and vying for attention, any favors either. A fine example was the Blogger Lounge. This room full of Mac users banging away at their OS X laptops while talking and twittering on their iPhones was symbolic of the problem. I had to ask someone, “so, who paid for all this food?” because the sponsor wasn’t immediately obvious. The answer was Windows Phone.
Windows Phone is based on what is being called Windows 7 Mobile. WinMo 7 - not to be confused with WinLarry or WinCurly - follows 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP, and Vista, if you are still counting. Regardless, as a mobile developer and consultant on all things digital, I wanted to give the new mobile platform its due and ask a representative in attendance a very basic question.
What do the developers on my team need to know to build games and applications for Windows Mobile?
The answer was shockingly stupid. They, Microsoft, have someone here, SXSW, that knows this information but can’t say until after a press release that was happening soon.
So this room full of Mac users is sponsored by a device that will appear in 6 months and will offer applications built with, well, something.
Awesome. Sign me up.
The Microsoft trade show booth didn’t fare much better. They were giving out hats for some product called Windows Azure. I admit I don’t keep up with Windows versions, but I don’t like being out of the loop, so I asked around for explanations. Pointing at the logo on my hat, I asked no less than 10 other attendees, including some real geeks hanging out at the various web hosting booths, what Azure was all about. The 10th person, admittedly, could tell me something about it. Up to that point, I was 0 for 9 and given mostly blank stares.
Yes, its two minor examples, but considering that this show was full of people ahead of the curve and steering the trends of their respective industries, Microsoft is not in a good place right now. A few hits could turn the ship around, but at least in the spring of 2010, the annoying and uncanny ability of Bill Gates to capture the market and crush adversaries seemed a distant memory.
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