In the past year, we read a lot of articles about whether Microsoft is dead or dying, like there is no third option. We saw these speculations ten years ago when Microsoft was about one tenth of its current size and we’ll probably read them again ten years from now when Microsoft is 10 times its current size.
Ian Rae explains how Microsoft is successful in the business software; the part of software that will not leave the PC soon to the internet. I actually thought in 1998 when Bill Gates first declared his intention to build the .NET framework that his intention was to move software to the internet, and a good candidate was MS Office, so that people would buy a subscription to edit their word documents, excel expense sheets or even prepare their presentation online. The beauty would have been that if you are an occasional user then a small one time access fee will work great for you. It took the industry almost a decade to see this happening at this level as Google today announces their plan to offer an online presentation building tool for free.

It is not a new idea, I should say, you all have seen online websites building tools for so long, even photo editing and enhancing tools found on online printing shops…etc. but the question is why Microsoft didn’t do that when it was able to do it?

In an article nearly six months ago I read that 90% of Microsoft profit comes only from Windows and Office business. This probably explains how crucial to the company any change to their sales strategy in those two fields. We saw SQL Server given for free after the end of its bloody war with Oracle; which could be the result of the open source database server like MySQL nevertheless I don’t like to pay for database server which I see a mature piece of software 15 years ago.

So still the question isn’t whether Microsoft is dead or not, the question is why it is not adored by people of the industry. I think the answer is because Microsoft wants a share in every PC-related business even if it doesn’t have the experience in that field, and money does not buy her the experience only time does, and this is why we see the company changing a lot in between version 1.0 and 2.0 in each new business they do, we saw that clearly in between MSS 2004 which now became deployed and in use with no future and MSS 2007 yet to come; a fully dramatic change that left Microsoft friendly developers unhappy wasting their time while Microsoft is learning telephony and meanwhile also learning how to screw up telephony business. I’m saying that because we might see eventually a Microsoft Speech SDK Express (as in SQL Server) given for free when the company discover that the 90 percent in Windows and Office business ratio simply did not change.

The only chance that push Microsoft to play fair in the industry is for that ratio to decline, and while no one wants the operating system to be nothing but standard like Windows, the only place left is Office and Google has just started an interesting run.