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November 04, 2003
Anticipating the new model OS's
Long before I was born (so I'm a bit hazy on this), when America had fallen in puppy love with cars, a "wonderful" tradition happened each fall. Auto makers would unveil, in the most dramatic fashion possible, the new models for next year. The local auto dealer would cover up their big plate glass windows for weeks in advance, with the new cars under heavy covers in the showroom, and a huge crowd would gather around the day/evening the car was unveiled with fanfare (probably bands and dancing and free hot dogs).
Most people don't care about new model cars like that anymore (we are interested, but it's not the highlight of the season).
When I started in The Industry (I.T.), Microsoft picked up on this tradition. Windows95 was as big as any rock concert that summer. Windows2000 out-did Win95. WindowsXP was even better. Rah Rah.
But Microsoft out-did Detroit. They didn't just unveil something we could immediately buy after weeks of excited anticipation. They started talking about Win95 in 1993 or so. And Win2000 was Win1998, Win1999, and Win2000 (and almost became Win2001 if I remember right). By the time we got to Win2000, the excitement was more of a sigh of relief, knowing that finally we'd stop reading about what we would eventually get, and we could finally get down to the business of running it. Microsoft was vicious with this, too, destroying all opportunities for competing products and even companies by showing customers what they would get in "just" another 6-12-18-24-30-36-... months, if they waited for Microsoft instead of buying a competing product that works now, but obviously has a dim future.
That was then. Things are different now. Not at Microsoft, who is doing the same thing with LoooooooooongHorn (was 2002, then 2003, then 2004, then 2005, now 2006). But with the competition.
Microsoft started a few months ago showing the world what they'd get in LongHorn. In 2006. Which based on past history, we know is probably 2-3x what will actually end up in the product. Get the developers jazzed, get a bunch of press, start telling customers that they'll regret going to OS X or Linux because LongHorn will be so much better, so stick to Microsoft even if the competition looks better now.
Consider how much has happened with Linux and OS X in the last 3 years. Consider that there are no fewer than a dozen competing products that are indistinguishable from the functionality that Windows provides, in many cases superior (Open/Star Office, AbiWord, Koffice, KDE, Gnome, iLife, OS X, Red Hat, Sun Java Desktop, SuSe, etc). Many of these are not much older than 3 years.
Consider that most of these projects issue major releases, with substantial improvements both in usability and underlying functionality, at least once per year.
Microsoft will probably include many new features in LongHorn. Some of those will be improvements on what's already available. Many competing products/projects will be able to implement those features as quickly as Microsoft releases them. This in addition to the progress they will already make on their own in catching up to and surpassing Microsoft (and each other). Most of the competing products (contrary to what Microsoft often says) do not compete feature-for-feature, but take a dramatically different (and often better) approach to solving the problem (compare OpenOffice vs. Office, or GIMP vs. Photoshop).
Microsoft also can't adequately address many of their customers' most serious problems with WindowsXP/.NET, until LongHorn is available (how many people are dreading the next 3 years of patching XP before LongHorn provides a different method). In fact, they will focus more effort on encouraging customers to wait for LongHorn, and developing LongHorn, while focusing as few resources as possible on existing maintenance (because that just sets LongHorn back further--all of the security issues in Win95/98/Me/2000/XP have to really be causing havoc for LongHorn).
All the while competing OSS and OSS-based projects (like OS X) are picking up steam. By the time LongHorn is released, the software (and I.T.) industry is going to be very different. Microsoft isn't going to go out of business, but they have/are going to have some very serious competition and more threats to their success than they've had since the early 1990's.
The anticipation is delicious.
Posted by pete at November 4, 2003 09:18 AM
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